Let us be fair to the tabs. They are not laziness. Each one was opened deliberately, by a person exercising real judgment, who thought this is worth keeping and reached for the only tool within arm’s reach.
The tab strip is genuinely a filing system. It has exactly one flaw, which is everything about it.
Tabs are a to-do list that punishes you for finishing
An open tab means unresolved. Closing it feels like discarding the decision it represents, so nothing gets closed and the strip becomes a wall of identical favicons, each one a promise you cannot read at that size.
The favicon is not an index
Past about twenty tabs, you can no longer identify any of them without hovering. Past forty, hovering stops being faster than searching from scratch, which means the archive has become slower than having no archive at all.
They are one software update from gone
Tab restore works until the day it does not: an overnight update, a crash, a well-meant restart. A week of research can evaporate between Friday and Monday, and nobody writes a postmortem about it because it feels like a personal failing rather than a systems one.
It is a systems failing
Anything that requires a machine to never be turned off is not a storage strategy. It is a hostage situation with a nice interface.
Keep the instinct, change the destination
The instinct behind every open tab is right: this person matters, keep them. The mistake is the destination. Send that instinct somewhere with search, structure and a life expectancy longer than the session, and you can close all four thousand without losing a single decision.
You will not read them later
You will not. Nobody has, in the history of tabs. Save the profiles properly and let the browser be a browser again.