To be honest, I am really confused by this thread. You folks seem to think that at @patleeman implements this FR. But it’s not correct. Tab reuse is what @patleeman’s plugin attempts to do (there are other plugins like no-dup-leaves and mononote) .
As I have pointed out several times, “try to reuse an already open tab” is different from “always open in new tab”. There is a separate FR for that case here
I am now inclined to think that a sizable portion of users in this thread (perhaps a majority) actually want “tab reuse” and maybe are not familiar with how IDEs operate so there is a difficulty in expressing what they want.