There’s a lot of truth to this, and I don’t necessarily disagree.

I think to play effectively with fewer tabs, you just have to be a lot more choosy about what you put up for sale on the tabs you can dedicate to being public/searchable. With limited tabs it doesn’t make sense to try selling all those 1-5c items, you just have to vendor them and wait for that big drop which is worth the space. You also need to be willing to sell those big drops for less, to move them quickly and create stash space. This idea of stash space pressure is an intentional design choice by them, but admittedly it is a questionable one.

Ultimately I think this ends up being a better experience for the player, because less time trading means more time enjoying maps. But it’s difficult for newer players to approach the game this way, so that is a significant hurdle. As a seasoned vet with more stash tabs than I know what to do with, I find myself using lots of them in first two weeks of a league, and then ultimately using very few after that.

I’m pretty excited for poe2, it looks just as good as D4 graphically (which has always been a Poe shortcoming), and it will almost certainly have much more replayability.