The issue that I'm thinking about here is finding active UI elements that already contain what I am looking for. I have been able to do this to a certain extent in Emacs by writing commands to go to a specific buffer that is already open, except that even that doesn't quite for a variety of reasons including the fact that sometimes you want some exact state and sometimes you want a clean slate and in Emacs in particular doing that can completely mangle buffer ordering. At some point I will get fed up with the current state of things and fix whatever brain dead heuristic destroys the buffer ordering but for now I find workarounds.
Essentially the issue is that yes, it would be great to be able to put a pin in the high dimensional state space that is a computer + network and just ... go back to that point, but even ignoring the engineering challenges my experience is that the dominate UI paradigms haven't really even considered the issue (though the research community surely has).
A somewhat real-world example: I have 5 tabs open for reference on an Elixir project I plan to return to over the weekend and 12 tabs open for a Python project I’m currently working on. When I’m done with today’s Python work, I expect to have no more than seven of those Python tabs remaining.
Not trying to be snide, but having that many tabs open and expecting to ever come back to the same one twice is 100% incomprehensible to me. But, I freely admit, I start trying to pare down when my tabs get narrower than the default width. I've gathered that I'm an anomaly