I don't use tabs, sometimes I use split windows (usually only when vim-diffing), mostly I use multiple terminal windows in a tiling WM. I do use multiple buffers but I usually don't care about editing more than one or two at a time and it's easy to re-open these whenever I need to.
That's true for me too but usually my tabs and windows are managed one level higher, by the terminal emulator, or I'm opening vim with -o/-O to open a split window directly.