Saving 100s of tabs isn't going to work either, unless you can remember the name of the window and then tediously look through the list of open tabs. In that case, just search through your history instead of having the tabs.
Not everyone's memory works the same way, and not everyone's organizational skills are the same. Whereas (it sounds like) you remember a task you're trying to do, and then go do it, and make a new tab and go do the task, for others, coming across the tab itself serves as the reminder about the task, and a call to action to do it. I'll open a tab that I need to do X, forget about X/procrastinate about X, open a tab for Y, and then Z, and then through going to a random tab, get to the tab about X, get reminded about doing X, and then go do it.
Sure It can. For example, If I'm looking for a certain stackoverflow post about a project I'm working on, I know it's be on the window with the other resources for that project, and I can remember that it's roughly on the middle right portion of that group of tabs. That narrows it down to <10 tabs to quickly check.
If I use my browser history, I'm going to have to re-filter out all of the webpages I deemed inadequate. If the tab was left open, I know it was at least somewhat useful.
Firefox switch to tab, my friend. You open a new tab, start typing the title of the page or the address of the site and it shows up in autocomplete with a switch to tab indicator and when selected it moves you to that tab instead of opening a copy.
Isn't that a good use case for the bookmark function?
To answer the actual question: I don't. Either I read it immediately or will never get back to it. There is always enough fresh content. I don't need another backlog.
And let's be honest, if you have a backlog of 7400 pages, neither do you.
At 7400, that backlog of articles is clearly aspirational, but there's some place where I do want to read about a topic, but only when I'm in the right mood, and I'm not in the mood to read about that topic right now, usually at the start of the day I'm in a more productive mood and by the end I'm not, and so there are different topics to read about at different times of day.
My bookmark list is huge and basically acts as (part of) a knowledge base. Conversely, open tabs are something of a hybrid between a "read this later" and to-do list.
I'm sure there are many other styles of organizing tasks/knowledge, and I would be a bit careful about discrediting what apparently works for other people.
There's borderline cases of working against UI paradigms like using the trash as a folder to store important documents, but I'd argue that this one isn't one of them.
I go to the same set of pages all the time, and the browser has it in the search history. So usually only have to type a few characters to navigate to it.
Do people often seek out obscure pages without entering from a more common context?
Entering pages from a common but changing context is in fact the main way to get more open tabs. I often scan the main page of HN or my newspaper and right-click the titles that look interesting to open them in the background, then go through those tabs at my leisure, while those pages may drop off those main pages in the meantime (it's a kind of FOMO really). Some of those will then stay open while I get sidetracked doing actually important things. Those pages are usually ephemeric and not meant as a reference, so not good bookmark candidates.
Maybe this could be a clue as to what's happening: What if other people have different use cases and needs?
Even between work and personal browsing I use my browsers quite differently. At work, tabs are more of a to-do list (things I need to review/sign off etc.); for personal, tabs are a largely a reading list.
I'd never just remember all things people want me to take a look at and type them in the search history, so tabs solve that nicely for me.
Way too much overhead for many of the things I use tabs for.
Frequently, the time it takes me to action whatever I have a tab open for takes as long as adding it to, reloading it from, and marking it off of a to-do list.