I tend to cull tabs a lot myself, but I still find groups useful. Sometimes it's nice for focus to group together a few tabs from research but "minimize" it for later while I look at some other topics.

>Is this more an issue with bookmarks and history not being as useful as they could be?

If you want to put it in hardware terminology.

- Tabs I am immediately interested in: registers

- Tab groups minimized: RAM

- Bookmarks: Hard Drive

- Pocket: cloud storage

- History: My attempt to restore something I put in the recycle bin

Tab groups are a good intermediate to store knowledge I don't need immediately but still need quick access to, likely within the day. It's often some tangential research that I won't need to save or lok at long term, but not my immediate attention.

In my head, bookmarks are more for items I know I want to reference for weeks, months, years. Stuff I know I would want to pluck out and share as popular/general knowledge if others fall down a similar line of research as me. I only tend to refer to the history tab when desperate and my judgement failed to realize something was bookmarkable.

as a current example, I have this tab and a few open researching work stuff. I have a tab group collapsed regarding career advice and job app stuff.