This actually came up in a thread the other day, so feels weird to be talking about it again, but I've been playing with Arc[1] lately. Took me a while to get used to how they treat tabs (almost more like bookmarks) but I've enjoyed it. Squirrel the ones I want to truly keep around into folders ("To Review", "Some Project"), but all the randomly opened tabs automatically get closed after a specified time period (default 24 hours, I have mine set to a week). When I hit cmd+t I can _reasonably_ often get to the right tab I've already got open.
I have a feeling the honeymoon will end when they start trying to figure out a monetization strategy, but so far I'm rooting for them.
[1] https://arc.net/
Chrome's been doing this recently and I absolutely love it
I try and be disciplined but like you end up having to manually stop myself and drag tabs back to the ‘proper’ group.
What I want is for the address bar to give me a really quick way to jump to existing tabs, if I start to type in the address of one I already have open. The entire reason my tabs get out of control is that at some point I get enough open that I start to lose track of what's there, and repeat myself. End up with like 5 AWS tabs, only one of which I'm actually using, stuff like that. So finally I just bookmark the whole set ("just in case"—I've not once looked back at these, in almost a decade of working this way, though I bet there's some great shit in there) and start over.
Apple's "tab groups" approach being a solution, but the trouble is I forget to switch to the correct group for a given site and end up using a single jumbled-up session anyway. It needs better (more automatic, probably) UI.