@deloreskstaple It is not a bug or a glitch it is just a change done in some version on how tabs behave and work.
Since it was not reverted so far I assume the changes were made on purpose or were a side effect of some other changes but deemed OK and not a bug. It is beyond me why. The behavior of tabs is quite universal in all chromium based browsers and I would expect Opera to not degrade with time on such basic features.
With the latest Opera updates tabs got even more unusable for tablet users, since the close button of a tab only appears on mouser hover.