For the record, I find tabs to be almost as much of a UI dead-end as myriad windows. They are often incompatible with the need to see several things at once, and they become unmanageable past a dozen or so.

Personally I prefer environments where the number of windows/tabs/buffers is a non-issue, something managed by the environment. All I care about is:

a) Navigating back and forth between the thing I'm looking at now and the last ~10 things I looked at; and

b) Quickly finding and foregrounding new things by whatever searchable aspect I can remember about them.

I don't want to think or care about how many old things I once looked at the environment keeps open; it is welcome to manage that on its own.

Incidentally, this is exactly what it's like to use RubyMine with tabs turned off. I can navigate backwards and forwards through history, and I can find things by name, and it worries about how many buffers to keep open in the background. If I go "back" to a buffer it has closed, it re-opens it.

This is complemented by the fact that it auto-saves. Having high-quality "Undo" is far more important than manually controlling when things are saved, in my experience. In the RubyMine case, it is able to visually show and undo every change that has been made since the last Git commit.