This is because the developers removed the #extended-lazy-session-loading flag since the 46 dev build appeared in May.
It might be painful for us, but they (Opera team) seems to not listen.
My work rely heavily on Opera and the usefulness of #extended-lazy-session-loading AKA "not load inactive tabs". So in the mean time, I recommend all of you to stick with Opera stable 45.0.2552.898 or Opera beta 45.0.2552.634 - these are the last versions that still have that flag working properly.
If the next official Opera builds still missing this flag or any workaround, I may have to switch to another Blink-based browser completely.