My guess is that there are more people accidentally closing extra tabs than people who want to close a lot of tabs they haven't seen in a while.

There are many good reasons to limit users and user interactions to the appropriate existing context. A "double-click" is a Windows metaphor and not a Web metaphor and should ignored if not actively discouraged. I have nothing against Windows but it's simply not appropriate to extend its behavior to the web.

But, saying that idempotency is hard and thus we should build features to get around it.. that seems wrong to me. The web is inherently a distributed system and you're going to have concurrent requests and weird edge cases that arise in those situations. The right way to handle that isn't to bandaid it with disabling client side behavior. That just hides to problem. Your server is the place to handle it.[1]

And, it really isn't that hard either. It's just a couple extra validations on your input before you do a write. There are places where it is more difficult but still not overly complicated to implement.

[1] Dogmatism alert. Of course, there are exceptions to everything that's a 'best practice'. Here, I'm just talking about disabling double-click as a general solution for the web to a concurrency problem.

Also since 2015 the mobile adaption increased more and more. On mobile devices, the "double tap" concept never was very important, I think (at least not in the web context).

Therefore my feeling is that this issue is mostly a thing from the past.

Nevertheless I sometimes see forms which implement this "disable after submission" principle. Especially when it's about money, such as when booking a hotel or flight, etc.

This means any accidental doubleclicks are launching new tabs or windows that I don't want.

If I want a definition of a word, I have more global, convenient ways of handling that.

Now, if instead double-clicking did something like spawn a topic search through NYT or news.google.com or something, without the hassle of underlining every word, I can imagine that would at least seem useful.

    document.addEventListener('dblclick', event => {
      if (event.target.closest('a, input, button'))
        event.preventDefault()
    })

Thanks for the reference, and thanks to the OP

Currently to avoid executing events twice, you can disable action replay on a specific button (it will show the click event but not replay the action).

I have always considered implementing or using something like rrweb but the performance and privacy implications are huge. Still a lot of customers would prefer that, mostly for the ecommerce cases you mentioned.

Also, I am glad they implemented it. It gives people who just click things, like my girlfriend, pause. It makes them double check what is happening.

My generalized solution that would work in any interface layout is to add new interface elements as disabled, and leave them disabled for maybe 1 full second. This would eliminate 90% of false clicks on fast moving popups.

That's why I have bookmarklets to disable the dictionary lookups and other what I consider annoyances on sites that implement those features on doubleclick and yes I've been told that I'm crazy on many occasions.