And I'm very happy about better support for this kludge, but I do wish that someone would get to the roots of the needs that cause this use of tabs, and design the correct interface for it instead.

You could create visual groups and lay out sets of tabs and even name the sets, and switch between them at will. It was awesome.

From the way you describe it I think it sounds like a great start for at least some of the needs driving this. I suspect in many cases heavy multi-tab use comes from a need to lay out sets of documents for use together in some sort of spatial metaphor. The traditional desktop model often does a pretty good job of covering this for local files and native programs, but I find browsers to be far weaker at supporting it.

As a complement, for the potentially-life-changing(-but-not-right-now-for-goodness-sake) things and other valuable resources I will almost certainly never find my way back to otherwise, I think it might be a nice start if I had a 1-keypress way to drop them, with metadata, into an local, indexed archive. The followup challenge to that would be a really good interface to getting stuff out again. Tools like Zotero could in principle cover the first part of this niche automatically already, but I wouldn't want the backlog archive (sluggishly) dropped together with my references without any shadow of compartmentalization, so I don't really view that as a ready solution.

It also has a very interesting fresh take on history.