I think vertical tabs has the exact same effect of being artificially space limiting if that's valuable to you, without the amount of visible text changing ever

I think vertical tabs has the exact same effect of being artificially space limiting if that's valuable to you, without the amount of visible text changing every single time you open or close a tab. I tend to sit with 20-40 tabs open, which is in the vicinity of how many a vertical tab list can accommodate comfortably, but I get about 4 letters per tab. If I needed to be able to see the text, I'd have to cap a window out at maybe 8 tabs, which is just unreasonable for some workflows.