How about I try a metaphor: Imagine you work in a building. Inside the building, there are multiple rooms. Each room has a different project going on inside it. In one room, you are building a canoe. In another, you are restoring a motorcycle. Another is a music production studio. And so on. Every day, you enter this hypothetical building to get some work done in one or more of the rooms.
Now imagine every night while you're asleep, a cleaning crew comes into your building and tidies up. But they don't just sweep the floor and take out the garbage, they also put away all the tools, pick up any open books and put them back on the bookshelf, re-assemble the motorcycle, and put the music equipment back in its retail boxes.
When you come back in the morning, you have to dedicate minutes to hours just getting things back to where they were when you left. And because you're ADHD as fuck, you probably don't remember exactly where you left off and frequently end up skipping some major step or accidentally redoing work that you did before.
That is what my life feels like without tab groups.
i feel exactly like you, but i managed to solve that problem with windows, each room/project is a window with tabs. since the UI makes switching windows easy, that makes switching projects easy. eventually i discovered the winger extension which allows me to give windows a name, its important feature, because it makes finding the right window easier. it also makes it easy to move tabs from one window to another.
Windows are a good solution, except, MS Windows (my home desktop) makes it not a good solution.
I'm pretty sure the ordering of my 4 firefox windows used to stay fixed (i.e when clicking the tray icon, and seeing the 4), but this stopped being the case a few years ago for me.
So I live with 3-4 windows; I don't think having 10 windows would help me because their arrangement is not consistent.
(I hover between about 600-1100 tabs open; I do cleanup when I notice I'm near or above 1000; I don't reliably do cleanup after e.g. opening 5 ebay tabs and deciding what to buy; nor do I reliably finish using those ebay tabs in one sitting; multiply that by the dozens of things I might be researching/comparing, going back many months :) )
(I keep my work Linux laptop Chrome browser to under 50 tabs, and often don't bother restoring tabs after my laptop is rebooted)
Now imagine every night while you're asleep, a cleaning crew comes into your building and tidies up. But they don't just sweep the floor and take out the garbage, they also put away all the tools, pick up any open books and put them back on the bookshelf, re-assemble the motorcycle, and put the music equipment back in its retail boxes.
When you come back in the morning, you have to dedicate minutes to hours just getting things back to where they were when you left. And because you're ADHD as fuck, you probably don't remember exactly where you left off and frequently end up skipping some major step or accidentally redoing work that you did before.
That is what my life feels like without tab groups.