Comment by bananadonkey

Regarding wanting to preserve the current version of a page: I use Karakeep to archive those pages. I am sure there are other similar solutions such as downloading an offline version, but this works well for me.

I do this mostly for blog posts etc I might not get around to reading for weeks or months from now, and don't want them to disappear in the meantime.

Everything else is either a pinned tab (<5) or a bookmark (themselves shared when necessary on e.g a Slack canvas so the whole team has easy access, not just me).

While browsing the rest of my tabs are transient and don't really grow. I even mostly use private browsing for research, and only bookmark (or otherwise save) pages I deem to be of high quality. I might have a private window with multiple tabs for a given task, but it is quickly reduced to the minimum necessary pages and the the whole private window is thrown away once the initial source material gathering is done. This lets me turn off address bar search engines and instead search only saved history and bookmarks.

I often see colleagues with the same many browser windows of many tabs each open struggling to find what they need, and ponder their methods.