Different people are different. When researching a question without a direct answer, it's more effective for me to open up tabs as I read a page and then search the most likely candidate. Whenever I reach a dead-end I can just switch tabs as opposed to pressing the back button N times. zzalpha's comment sums it up nicely: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14824086

I know I'm a power user, but I miss how effective old Chrome was at this.

The same approach works well for forum discussions. One tab representing the forum, and child-tabs to track the comments section.

For instance with HN, tabs provide quick navigatable references back to discussions that are relevant to my interest, and that might contain lead-off liks/references after they have fallen off the front-page.

I'm a chronic tab abuser as well, often with over 100 tabs at once. 1000 tabs still sounds insane to me.

Well, I'm running 600+ in Firefox for no particular reason. I guess that makes me only 60% insane.

I'd compare it more to bringing a stack of books to your table at the library. Just because you could notate the name and position of each and fetch them as needed doesn't mean it's not helpful to have them all handy. I've never personally used that many tabs for research, but vetting sources often requires taking a look at a lot of different links for any given subtopic.

Or that you don't know which tabs will be useful until you open them, and your qualification process is multi-pass.

It's not the same as having 1000 TV channels turned on at once.

No, it's like having 1000 radio/tv channels available at once, which you can tune to any one of in a mere moment.