I have a personal wiki where I save links together with self-made notes and links/references associated with it. This provides a persistent record that is richer than that which bookmarks can provide, and can be accessed from any device that I happen to be on (my own devices, or devices that aren't my own, or links shared to others).
For regular sites, I too type in the URL and it usually autocompletes.
For myself, bookmarks have always fallen into a middle ground that I don't have much use for.
So while it comes down to preference, I think the preference was highly influenced by the technology.
That's a weird assumption, I have several hundred bookmarks. Bookmarks and tabs have different UX and fill different roles. That's why you use 10 tabs and bookmarks, instead of 1 tab and bookmarks. That's why I use 30-40 tabs and bookmarks.
I have 500 tabs open on my iPhone. It is sort of like a queue of content that I can read when I have excessive free time.
I'd like to write an extension that killed your old tabs after a while. I already have an idea to do that with a todo list app that automatically gets rid of your old items.
Either you spend too much time looking for new things to add to the queue, too little time processing the queue, both of the above, or you cast too wide a net for what you might possibly read one day.
If you can knock one off every day you've got two and a half year's worth of items in your queue that you haven't even looked at yet? This is on top of all the things you are already consuming as part of your work or for leisure and at the same time assuming you don't add more things to the queue.
That's madness, and I don't care if you call me judgmental.
It is unreasonable to have that many items in your to-read queue. Stop adding things or start reading things faster (or better yet, both!)
And oh I sure have looked at them, but havent grokked them. Once I do that or I come back to them again and again then they get bumped to a bookmark. Lets say they are part of my job and leisure, sometimes I lose track which is which.
Think generational garbage collection. Tabs and bookmarks are the different generations. I still like tabs better as they preserve more context.
Btw some jobs require more researching than others. Regarding "madness" yes I agree.
But having so many tabs open makes the tab UI useless, so I prefer to close them.
Generally when researching something I'll pick a number of search terms, and for each, I'll actually open a few of the hits (in a new tab each time). Of those hits, most get closed right away once I actually look at them and see they're useless, of the rest, I might read a few, or follow the most relevant seeming links. (But usually close some large number of them)
Wash rinse repeat until I'm actually left with a very small set of things that are pertinent to the task at hand.
(This process does seem to leak slightly. I have to do a separate garbage collection pass once in a while.)
I have never been able to use Chrome effectively because my browsing habits are so tied to being able see many tabs open at once. I almost always open links by opening them in a new tab and I always open a new tab when starting something new.
Bookmarks are an improvement over writing addresses down on paper or copying and pasting into a text file. That's about it.
Heck, most of the sites I visit on anything like a regular basis I only need to type in the first letter or two and they auto-complete.