I don't believe it should be up to the browser to deal with tabs. I don't actually believe tabs are a particularly good representation of browsing.
Using extremely light browsers such as surf (http://surf.suckless.org) in a good window manager such as i3 (https://i3wm.org) makes each page a first class window, without any browser clutter.
You soon learn to browse with as few pages open as possible. Opening new tabs is a promise to spend time in the future. Using simpler linear navigation helps keeping focus. I want to know why I'm browsing, not hoping that I go through every tab that I lazily felt I might need to see in some open-ended future. The web is broken but with some effort you can alienate most of the cruft from your usage.
I've tried all the third-party type attempt to solve it (everything from saving the links in a textfile I always keep open to ReadItLater, OneTab, Pocket etc. All those things are where tabs go to die, never to be read again. More like ReadItNever, amirite?). That's a "solution" I guess.
Now I try to be more selective in what I "keep" to read later, and as soon as I hit 40-50 tabs, I go through and kill a bunch of them. It hurts a bit, but not as bad as when I have hundreds of tabs.
You are not alone.
I've never gotten to 100 tabs before. For entirely practical reasons, that Chrome can't handle it. It runs out of memory and grinds my computer to a halt.
Yep, been there before too. My "light" laptop only has 6GB of RAM, so Chrome starts to dog out pretty quick if I go tab crazy on it. It can handle about 25 tabs and then it starts freezing the entire system for minutes at a time.
Fortunately my "big" machine has 32GB of RAM and an i7 processor so it can handle 4 or 5 Chrome windows each with oodles of tabs, 2 or 3 Eclipse instances, and various server processes all running at the same time. I just can't bear carrying that thing around because it weighs a frickin' ton. :-(
I also have to run a FF and a Chromium (two separate Google accounts is basically unmanageable without separate browsers). This is enough to fill 8GB. Good Lord the web is fat these days.
I also use chrome profiles to separate my workspaces, so I don't have to load everything all the time and search through my tabs to find the one I want. I even sync them to different accounts.
Mobile is the only place I use multiple browsers, due to mobile browsers not supporting multiple windows, even though chrome has already had the functionality for it in the past (remember the chrome 'desktop' when chrome ran in metro mode? Alternatively, just have multiple entries in overview). On my tablet I have six browsers, which is probably more than I really need; two incognito browsers and four mobile browsers. Various combinations of add-ons (firefox) and not (chrome), incognito (focus and inbrowser) browsers, and browsers (chrome) with JavaScript disabled.
You can use Firefox's container tabs for this.
Like you said about the boring material. I wouldn't think of them as boring. But detailed, and basically takes a long time to grasp. I will need to spend at least an hour or two on the topic. And i since it is not the most important things in life This two hours schedules gets put away for the time being.
Then there is the Apple News tabs hoard which happens in Apple Events.
If I see a tab open that I haven't looked at in a while, I try to make the effort to either submit it to Pocket or Pinboard, and then close it.
You could argue that's just moving the problem elsewhere, but I like to think I'm making at least some organisation effort.
The feature I like best about diigo is for what I do read, I can highlight the sentences I want to recall or locate later.
But I have on more than one occasion been unable to remember how I got to a page, or even how to search for it, and in those times I found my system invaluable.
Less out of sight as well, the next time I do a google search, diigo plugin injects my existing stuff beside the search. I like the offline copy it keeps for me like you said.
It's not perfect but not a sinkhole of bookmarks.
Looking at my current open tabs, most of them are dense "boring" reading material like scientific papers (or reddit/HN discussions of them.) I feel they are important to read but don't feel motivated to do so ever.
I've never gotten to 100 tabs before. For entirely practical reasons, that Chrome can't handle it. It runs out of memory and grinds my computer to a halt. So I had to triage away the least important tabs and bookmark them or force myself to read them, just to keep my computer running. I just starting using firefox though, which is not helping this bad habit.