FWIW I use aerospace and break up those 22 windows into ~4-6 windows with ~3-5 tabs each, then move each window to a different virtual workspace that I switch to with option + hotkey like opt+1, opt+2, opt+3 or even opt+D and so on

Christ.

On some level, this is probably something your terminal emulator should handle, just as your web browser should handle a mess of 22 tabs, but I don't think we've really come up with good solutions there either. It's hard to implement features nobody's though of.

Terminal emulators have tabs and windows already, even macOS’ built in terminal, so what do you mean?

That solutions like tabs should be the responsibility of the terminal emulator you're using, and not the greater OS.

Should it? In terms of window management, what's ideal? Should every program have to implement tabs and then have its own tab manager, and bookmarks and favorites? If we take a step back and look at the bigger window management problem, what makes the most sense for most users? Monitors these days are relatively cheap, so the fight for screen real estate isn't the same problem as it once was. The onus is on the operating system to make it better for the user to arrange things how they want things to work.

Terminal should be responsibility of OS. God knows it’s deep enough. It could be so much better—and it matters!

I know expecting UX innovation from Apple is laughable, but there was a time…

Have you tried other 3rd party terminal applications? (Iterm, ghostel, CMux)

They have many quality of life improvements over the basic terminal.

I use Ghostty. I’ve tried iterm and cmux.

I think we can do better. It’s a hard problem, admittedly. But important.

I'm sure you've considered and rejected tmux, but is this only because it has a different UI than a native OS app?

Tmux