Could anyone using these explain what it provides that you find useful in practice? I rarely ever need persistence of shell when I close the console, is that a common need? Familiarity/muscle memory of shortcuts is a valid answer, but I'm wondering if there's more to it than that.
Now say you will be moving between home, office, and traveling. If the tmux session is hosted at work you can connect from anywhere and be in the same workspace with the same command history. If you have a dozen other projects happening at once this system can also be a big help as far as organization.
tmux preserves everything for you unless you explicitly kill it, or you have to reboot.
I started using Screen like 20 years ago (and later moved to tmux) and I can't go back to doing real work in a "bare" terminal window. It would feel like walking on a thin layer of ice on a lake; as soon as something goes wrong, it's a minor disaster.
In the unlikely event everything locks up and dies then mostly I'll just lose vim sessions, and I can vim -r to recover the data. This is rare, and vim complains at you when you start it up on a file after it has crashed.
You'd lose the window layouts, but I don't use crazy window layouts, generally no more than two panes for code+tests (running tests I let it flip to fullscreen and scroll and I've got that bound to a key combo in .vimrc). If I had crazy window layouts I'd probably setup a command alias to make it easy to pop them up.
When it comes to commands and such, I just use the command history which is my memory. When it comes to running daemon process I would detach them if I cared (and generally I've got command history so I don't care, I'll just restart it, no matter how arbitrarily complicated it was to get the command running).
Similarly, though, I don't horde tabs and I HATE it when the O/S starts popping open all the windows I had open after a reboot to upgrade the O/S or whatever. I try to run pretty much "statelessly" so that I can wipe everything and start over from nothing easily enough (obviously not really "statelessly" since e.g. slack remembers all kinds of state about what I've done in the past, but I don't have to remember any of that)
And my memory does suck, but I know how to pull things out of command history, internet search, google history, etc. If I need to track stuff, then I use a tool to track it so that it becomes persistent (Zotero has now replaced my folder full of PDFs, I take notes in Obsidian). I don't know what I would ever lose in a terminal window that I fundamentally couldn't get back (and if I ever really needed something such as some unique failure I'd probably take a quick screen shot or copypasta into a note file somewhere -- I'll commonly copy test failures into code comments temporarily while I'm working on them -- sometimes these get promoted to documentation in particularly hairy edge cases).
So I literally just pulled up iTerm in activity window and force killed it and I have no idea what disappeared, but I don't care... Based on the saved command history I can see I likely didn't lose anything at all...