AFAICT the comparisons to safari are no longer true

https://birchtree.me/blog/everyone-says-chrome-devastates-ma...

That might be different on other platforms

I can't vouch for Chrome and Safari themselves, but I can between Thorium and Falkon, because I regularly suspend Thorium and open the same page with Falkon, and watch the CPU usage graph drop from pegging a core to almost nothing.

I think the GP is talking about linux specifically. On a Mac I can see that Chrome disables unused tabs (mouse over says "Inactive tab, xxx MB freed up")