I've been struggling to use Chrome on my M1 Mac, because of how much RAM it eats, and memory saver wasn't enough.
I've made this extension based on combination of features on multiple separate extensions: 1. When you click on the new tab, only the first tab loads in background, the rest will have a placeholder until you click. 2. Only 3 active tabs per window are allowed to be loaded, the rest will be killed. 3. The extension watches if you have unsaved input, paused or active media, or if the page is configured to send notifications and it keeps these tabs alive.
I've been using it for a couple of weeks and it allows me to open way too many tabs to handle :)
The extension is published in Chrome Web Store, let me know if you have any questions!