I think a lot of the favoring of staff notation comes down to what the instrument does well. A majority of acoustic instruments are monophonic(voice, wind, brass, many strings) and have some form of linearity in pitch, and the staff accommodates them optimally - the beginner's sheet music always starts out by accompanying the staff with fingerings for each note, to help you get some confidence that you are actually playing right notes, and then after that it's pretty straightforward to extend your knowlege to read more notes.
Chord structure just isn't even touched in most of these instruments, at least in classical performance, because they aren't capable of polyphony! That only becomes a topic as one starts moving into, e.g., jazz improvisation, where knowing how to recognize and play around a root is critical. Piano is exceptional here, since finger independence and chording practically define that instrument.
On the other hand, guitar tabs are a Big Thing in part because guitar chords transpose very well, so you don't have to learn too many unique fingerings to start accessing the others - and then if the song is defined as a sung melody plus rhythmic chord backing, as a lot of popular songs are, you don't need more than a tab and hearing the tune once to have a shot at covering it competently.
Guitar's 2D layout favors isomorphism - this is what gives it this extra power to transpose. Guitar is conventionally not tuned isomorphically, but some forms of accordion like bayan, and alternative keyboard layouts such as Wicki-Hayden, Harmonic Table or Janko, are fully isomorphic. In that case, you don't have to mode set or learn any unique scales or chord fingering per key: Learn any set of intervals(chords or scales) and you can reuse them in every key by moving your fingers over. This is wonderful for learning theory and doing composition, but it doesn't make the instruments a 1-to-1 replacement for similar instruments as in performance the distances are usually much smaller, fingerings can get tangled, it can be harder to find your place or maintain tempo, etc.