It's interesting to think about the different ways I use tabs and how they might be better served. For example, I will often open a new tab to create a sort of "checkpoint", resulting in 5 tabs that represent different points in time in a browsing session. Other times I will open 5 pages that are analogous to each other in order to compare (for example, 5 similar products on Amazon). Other times it's a method of "forking" a browsing session into several different paths, while keeping the parent node in its own tab.

Not really proposing solutions here, but it does make tabs look a bit clunky.

Side note: For the last few months, I've been using a Chrome plugin that prevents me from opening more than a predetermined number of tabs at a time. Otherwise I just end up with 45 tabs open.