It's awesome to see Chrome trying to improve performance for people with many tabs open, which is many of us. I use a LOT of tabs, and the best plugin has been The Great Suspender. Highly recommend it for anyone who wants memory & CPU back and keeps many tabs/windows open at once: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/the-great-suspende...
I meet many tab hoarders (always open a new one, never close any, ending up with hundrets), but just can't wrap my head around it! I hate having more than 6-7 simultaneously open because it gets increasingly harder to keep an overview of what you're doing. The same applies for IDE tabs or windows. Too much of them and finding the right one becomes increasingly hard, and losing the thread more likely.
Why do you need an overview? It's like stack frames: you can limit your scope to what you're currently doing. The other tabs represent stuff that's "parked" and you aspire to come back to.
(This is why tabs are better than windows for this, because they maintain a linear order while most systems will re-order window order if you visit the windows)
My tab-opening habits predate tabs, because I was raised on Netscape Navigator with a modem using "open in new window" instead. I would read down a page and open interesting-looking hyperlinks in the background, so I didn't have to wait for them to load. Another advantage of this technique on modems was that I could close down the line and carry on reading.