I unsubscribe aggressively. I keep my inbox well maintained, but that's still not the feature I'm talking about.

My work sends me several shipping notifications a day, but they are not priorities. They are emails to be reviewed later in the day. I don't want push notifications for them. I don't want them in my primary inbox. Gmail (without me telling it to) puts them in the "updates" tab.

Same for the promotional emails that come in. They go in "promotions".

If I get a 2FA email or an update on a social website they are sorted in the "social" tab without my having to set anything up.

This is extraordinarily helpful for managing my email, and it is absent in every client I have tried.

Exactly. I do unsubscribe--perhaps not as aggressively as I should--but there's a ton of stuff I may want to be aware of that I don't want polluting my primary mailbox. Sometimes I even shift them to my primary tab but, in general, I'm happy with keeping my primary to stuff that I generally do mostly care about and have a few other categories I care about to varying degrees.

Shouldn't updates go to "social", and 2fa - to inbox?

This has been my strategy. I've had location history turned off since they introduced the tabbed inbox because for some reason the only way to turn off the tabs was to never save my location history. Not sure how those features got co-mingled but...One inbox feels much nicer. I don't get a ton of email though.

I don't want to unsubscribe from everything that I might not be interested in at the moment but may want to skim now and then to various degrees. I find gmail is very effective for that sort of thing. I find gmail's tabs pretty useful.

Maybe just me but I’d rather have and triage a single inbox instead of several. “Oh it’s in my social inbox that’s why I didn’t see it for 5 days”.

fwiw, you can easily see the contents of these tabs from your inbox. Each tab shows a preview of their two most recent emails, so you can easily monitor the activity. I check them directly 1-2 times a day with a single click. Things rarely get overlooked.

It's a pretty elegant design, which is why I'm so frustrated that Gmail has been the only service where I have found comparable functionality. I'd like to move away from reliance on Google.