What I do is very simple: I have a whittle-down goal, with what’s actually a fairly shallow slope (-2 per day), although I often retroratchet it.
Here’s a picture of my graph as it currently stands:
I’ve gone on and off this goal, as I manage to whittle it down to something reasonable, and then when I go off it it tends to balloon. But that’s fine, because when the number of open tabs hits something too unreasonable I just restart the goal. Here’s the graph with the x-min disabled:
As you can see, it actually works. I actually do keep my number of open tabs under control, without radical solutions like just closing them all.
I have to say, I consider the idea of declaring tab bankruptcy and closing them without reading them to be absurd: thanks to this Beeminder goal I’ve read and otherwise dealt with many interesting and useful tabs which had I declared bankruptcy I would have completely missed out on.
I can understand declaring tab bankruptcy if that was the only viable option to get things under control. But Beeminder exists, so why not have your cake and eat it too?
I’ll add that by far the most valuable thing about having this goal isn’t the -2 slope itself, but rather that it means that I can’t just go opening even more tabs willy-nilly. For every tab I open, I had better also close another by the end of the day (in fact, I had better close 2 more than the number opened).
I strongly recommend this method of dealing with too many open tabs. It works well, and it means that you do actually get to those tabs you opened. (As opposed to the type of solution which involves closing them all indiscriminately.)