The extension "The Great Suspender" works wonders here; suspends tabs in the background when they've been idle, but you don't lose your place. It has singlehandedly made Chrome usable again for me, while simultaneously enabling my 40+ tab habit. 90% of the time you don't need the tab to be active, you just want it there so you can revisit later. (For me anyway.)

Another vote for The Great Suspender. It's literally a must-have for Chrome users.

I'm a tab maniac - 421 tabs open now. This wouldn't be possible without TGS (and 32GB RAM), and another extension called Tabli to index them all.

General computer buying rule: always buy as much ram as you can afford even if it seems like an insane amount at the time! One thing that drives me nuts about phones and tablets. I want to pay more money for more, more ram. Nothing impacts your devices life span more than the amount of ram.