I'm curious whether people who have tons of tabs open ever turn off their computer? I always turn mine off in the evening or whenever else I think I'm done for the day because I never know when I'll turn it on again, and leaving it running for 14+ hours just doesn't feel right.
(~600 tabs) I don't turn it off, but I do put it to sleep. The growth is usually looking into something, or finding something interesting I want to come back to. Each time that happens it probably adds ~20 tabs. I'm almost always on my computer, or a computer sitting just next to it.
Once every few months I try to clear out a bunch. The last time was probably close to 150. Some are reminders, I really should do it a better way, but its really easy to forget about something in a bookmark and sometimes I just want to remember to come back to some silly comic and having it sometimes in view is enough. Honestly yea there is a chance loosing the tabs would cause me to tap out. For unloaded tabs they aren't in history and some of them have been there for... years. It would really bother me to not know what was lost.