I've been using a similar workflow with Sideberry on Firefox. It does work semi-good for research, though it still needs some manual organizing.
I think tree-tab browsers need some kind of scripting to automate curation: a new youtube.com tab will close itself and refresh the main one; tabs can have an exponentially decaying score reset on interaction, which puts them into the "Archived" and then closes them at certain thresholds, with some domains having a higher base; a simple Bag of Words classifier can group your tabs when called; etc. Otherwise you just waste too much time periodically organizing your persistent 400 tab window.
I think tree-tab browsers need some kind of scripting to automate curation: a new youtube.com tab will close itself and refresh the main one; tabs can have an exponentially decaying score reset on interaction, which puts them into the "Archived" and then closes them at certain thresholds, with some domains having a higher base; a simple Bag of Words classifier can group your tabs when called; etc. Otherwise you just waste too much time periodically organizing your persistent 400 tab window.