Usually one maximized window with a set of less than half a dozen pinned tabs plus 0 to a dozen regular tabs that I try to close as soon as practical (although I end up ctrl-shift-T re-opening a fair amount).
If I need a number of tabs for one task, I sometimes pull the base tab into a new window and spawn related tabs on that window so that when I'm done I can just close that window.
The odd time I have two additional windows split 50-50 across the display to compare their contents.