True, sadly I'm unable to stop using tree style tabs after getting accustomed to it years ago. It's one of those rabbit holes I'm unable to climb out of, similar to modern keyboard layouts.
Don't be sad. I'd say you're doing it right! Vertical space is much more limited than horizontal on 21st century monitors, and tabs are wide, not tall. Tree tab UI enables semantic layout (showing you practically unlimited levels of nesting), plus they always give you consistent room to read page titles. Why should the usability of tabs decrease as you open more of them?
I would say its superior. You can create and add tabs to groups. expand and collapse them. make rules for certain sites to auto open in a group you made. sort based on url or name or last used. rename them. move the groups around visually. I do use it with the vertical tab view and tend to ignore the top bar though so it may depend on your usage.
I mean you can say that about any tab add on really. You could mostly get it from some sort of auto bookmarking add on that additionally updated it based on browsing within a domain maybe and auto discarding on close although it still would nto quite be there because it would discard to much if you kept several tabs for a domain. I mean it might be able to recognize multiple tabs and save the bookmarks alright but the auto reaping I bet would mess up.
Yeah honestly all the other solutions are just copium. Chrome tab groups are exactly what a tab group should be. It's simple and useful. That's all I need, all I want.
I'm away from my PC so I can't name it but there's another plugin similar to Tree Style Tabs. The creator claims that TST takes up a lot of resources. I do notice Firefox taking a lot of CPU/mem but that's probably my fault. I've tried both and either works well.