How do you keep track of articles/web pages/etc. you want to refer back to?

You could use a bookmarks manager / read-it-later service where you'd save every article you read (or at least the ones you find most interesting). Most of them have a tagging system for organising by topic, some of them (including Readeck, the one I use) even locally save the article's content so you can search in it too, not just in the titles.

I struggled with having too many bookmarks most of which I never even visited.

I solved it by creating a few text files to serve as an abyss for links. That way I know that a link is saved somewhere but it also doesn't create a mess within my in-browser bookmarks.

I have a tab group on my phone where I move all tabs I'll look at later. I think there's over 1000 tabs in there now

I have a big mess of bookmarks sorted into different folders with titles that describe more of an emotion then any sort of description of what's in it.

I try to remember what it was called and type it into my address bar to see if it auto-completes from history. If so, cool. If not, then I have to convince myself that I wasn't interested in looking back at that page in the first place.