As an amateur vim user, may I ask what is the alternative to using file trees or tabs?
Telescope[1] is pretty central to navigation in Neovim these days. Think Ctrl-P in VSCode, but for any entity in your editor or workspace, not just files. Files in workspace, buffers (open files), ripgrep results, LSP symbols / references, etc. Also provides a live preview of search results without having to open them. Plus easily add results to your quickfix list, making large-scale edits easy.