Whereas I'm not a great fan of modals for anything where I'd like to refer back to what I'm working on. I guess I'd just prefer some tabs to open as a split by default and close with esc, maybe call them something like "ephemeral tabs"? Basically, steal some ideas from emacs.

in emacs with embark you can export the contents of an ephemeral buffer into a persistent one, which is the best of both worlds and more besides

for file search, edit in the persistent buffer can rename files

for grep, edits in the persistent buffer edit across files

and so on

Tabs will still be supported. Also, when you search for references, it also opens a new tab, even when all references are in the same file.