I would happily agree but I lost the one emacs and 119422 buffers mindset. I get lost in my own shit. I should spend time improving my ibuffer grouping but even then.. I like the idea of pop, edit, kill (which causes my harm).

If you bind crux-kill-other-buffers[1] to a key, you might end up with a workflow you're happy with.

[1] https://github.com/bbatsov/crux/blob/master/crux.el#L496

My solution: Accept that there will be dozens or even hundreds of buffers and use helm-for-files (which lists recent buffers first) to switch between the buffers I care about at any given time. Works really well.

I think I need some fancier categorization like day columns, and content tags. But I'll keep your suggestion in mind