Why do we have editor tabs?

I've found that I hardly ever use editor tabs.

It seems easier to use the explorer to open a new or an existing file.
Once you have a lot of files open the fact that _some_ of them might be
accessible via the tabs becomes immaterial. Instead of trying to decide
whether it's available and "scrolling" left and right it seems easier
to just [re]open the file from the explorer.

There is the "recent" files menu in the editor that seems of more
utility than the tabs because it gives you the list of files at a
glance and again you don't have to scroll the editor tabs. However it
shows files alphabetically which seems counter-productive, because I
expect it to be an LRU list.

Another thing I often want to do is to go to the "other" file. 
This is captured by the 'vi' ":e#" command. Again tabs don't
help here because the other file is usually not visible in the limited
space of 4-5 tabs.

So the tabs make little cognitive or task-oriented sense ...
what am I missing?