I'm retired now so the more complex stuff is behind me. Tab wise, when I was working with lots of tabs, it would typically be within the MS Excel spreadsheet or the project management programs MS Project and Primavera.
For example, I would have multiple tabs of subgroups of something so the detail work in question was in a logical arrangement and in smaller bite sizes then link those results into a master summary tab for the big picture.
Actually it is attempting to discern which tab is which when you have more than a few opened and they all look much alike (esp. when from the same site, like FR) and crunched up is what is difficult. And a vertical list is not as easy to find a page than multiple tab rows and Colorful Tabs. And you can just drag tabs and group them together. However, if you are not research-intensive then all you need is poor Edge or Chrome.