> Ideally the alert would only happen if the comment seemed important but it would readily discard short or nonsensical input

No, ideally I would be able to predict and understand how my UI behaves, and train muscle memory.

If closing a tab would mean losing valuable data, the ideal UI would allow me to undo it, not try to guess if I cared.

Yeah. It's the Apple OS model (we know what's right for you, this is the right way) vs the many other customisable OSes where it conforms to you.