With the exception of one or two, everybody was running terminals across multiple windows and not tabs. I spend considerable time on terminals on my Macs, but am a big fan of having a single terminal window with many tabs. I am curious whether people generally really prefer multi-window terminals and find it to have an advantage over the tabular alternative.
The advantage (for me, at least, on a Mac) is that it's easier to pick which terminal you want when they're laid out across the screen instead of all being in the same position: "The window I'm testing my code in is in the bottom right", "The window I'm compiling that large thing in the background is off to the left", "The window I'm running my backup script is up at the top".
I agree. For programming related use-cases, having multiple terminal windows can be very helpful. From a systems and networks administration perspective, I am not so sure, particularly when you can have simultaneous (SSH) sessions open to many systems.
Probably many people use tmux or screen rather than UI tabs on the terminal emulator, the feature set is just better. Plus you don't have to switch between two UI types for remote and local sessions.