> with fans blazing because HN on Safari can be demanding.

You've got to be joking?! I have a MacBook Air from 2020, which should still be less powerful than a MacBook Pro from 2018 and even on huge websites full of crap the fans won't kick in, let alone on HN which is the lightest website I frequent often.

The only time I hear the fan is when I compile a large project on my IDE or when the IDE re-indexes the JRE!

It's all whats in your tabs, comparing otherwise is useless.

I typically run between 100-200 tabs at any given time, most of them hibernated, but some readers only run 10 tabs.

100 tabs? Don't you ever close them? How do you even find a tab again when you want it? Can't you just use bookmarks or something like Pocket?

I think I never have more than 10 tabs open, so this is really surprising to me.

My workflow works great for me, I have no trouble finding tabs. I have multiple windows, tab groups, and extensions like TabSorter, The Great Suspender, Alfred Tab Search, and others to manage my tabs as a queue of things I want to read / get back to. I use Pocket as well, but that's for my queue of things I've already read that I want to archive, not things I want to read in the future.

I process a high volume of tabs but I keep it super organized, just like my filesystem and email.

Because of the way browsers work, it's a bad idea to keep that many tabs open. Most browsers consider each tab as its own process, and each tab consumes lots of memory... they really don't optimise for 100s of tabs open at a time.

I understand you got used to that, but really, there's no reason to keep that many tabs open.

That's only true if you don't suspend your tabs. I suspend 90% of the background tabs so they use almost no CPU and MEM while suspended. It works great on my i9 machine, I have plenty of processing power to spare, and I love being able to visually see the state of my reading queue without manually managing bookmarks.

I'd take a look at your process monitor I'm on a 2019 MacBook Pro 13 with 2.4 GHz Quad-Core Intel Core i5 and I barely ever have the fans kick on. Normally when something like that happens to me it tends to be me choking out the ram and causing the cpu to compress and uncompress RAM more than is reasonable.

Boot from an external SSD with a stock systems because that should not happen.