I wonder if the 100+ tab people are also the ones who can handle dozens of cups of coffee a day. I guess I'm boring. Whether tabs or coffee, I do 1-2 at a time/per day.
FWIW, I use safari as my primary browser and it seems to handle many tabs fine, though I'm sure I don't get up to the thousands of tabs that people are reporting. I can't say I've thought about how many tabs it can actually handle, though, as I do eventually clean things up, bookmarking tabs that are actually worth something and discarding the rest.