100 tabs on Chrome 10 years ago would not be very nice on the hardware. When you add Chrome's waste-of-space UI and horrible UX (broken ctrl+tab) with no option to change it, it's no wonder people didn't use more than a handful of tabs. On the other hand, if you had a browser that had no issues with it, you might get used to it.

So while it comes down to preference, I think the preference was highly influenced by the technology.