If you're doing research and opening tons of articles, it's common that you might want to go back into your browser history and reopen one of the last 50 things you might have opened but you might not remember the name of the page - it's faster to hold command+shift (or control+shift on windows) and left-bracket or right-bracket to page through tabs and glance at each tab for 2 seconds to see if it's the article you were trying to re-find as opposed to opening up your history and clicking each, waiting for the tab to load, realizing it's not that thing you looked at on Monday that you're looking for, go back to history, check the next link, repeat.
In other words - this behavior is proof that there's room for improvement of browser history UI.
Bookmarks are a thing. Evidently people don't use them anymore, given how shitty the default UI for it is in Chrome, but I recall being a young whippersnapper on dial-up with Netscape Navigator, and bookmarks was how you kept track of cool stuff you found (search engines were in such flux that I recall it being very difficult to find anything again, even with the same query, but I'm probably misremembering)
On the thought of improving tabbing UI and not using bookmarks, there are some non-mainstream browsers that work differently. uzbl-browser, I think it was, combines the two and makes no distinction between them.
In other words - this behavior is proof that there's room for improvement of browser history UI.