Funny how nostalgia differs for different people. I hated all that so much at the time that I installed linux (RH 7.x) from a magazine cd and learned to program in C & perl.

That multirows tab UI thing was an utter abomination against usability, intelligence, good sense, decency, justice and obviously any and all aesthetics. Why bring it back? To fix it maybe?

What about discoverability?

Multirow tab ai't pretty, but it allows you to know all your tabs -- unlike the modern scrollable tab bar that move one pixel on each click.

I guess this depends on you are using mouse clicks or have a touch screen you can swipe