It brings me peace to close tabs. I try to aim for having 4 or 5 open. Then I look at my girlfriend's screen and the favicon doesn't even fit it in the tab anymore and it kills me.
Sometimes that means 1 window, sometimes that means 4 windows. Just depends on what I’m doing.
But I don't think that people who have an insane number of tabs going are doing it wrong or anything. I'm just amazed that people find doing that to be useful.
If I'm working on a specific project and find a great resource, I'll definitely paste the link in an Obsidian note and close the tab. But there's plenty of stuff which doesn't quite fit that workflow.
Half joke aside, I think it's easy to get to 4-5 tabs depending on what you do but I don't understand tabs so small the favicon barely fits. That just seems like you've got psychological hoarding issues. You being general and not you-you strictly speaking.