Guitar tabs are simple and easy to learn, IF you're playing a song you already know. Most tabs I've seen just tell you which fingers to press down and which strings to hit, often excluding time signature, note duration, note intensity, rests, and other sightreading essentials.
Tabs' major appeal is that there's no learning curve: what you read is almost a physical representation of what you play. And it only requires a text editor to write, and can easily be published and shared on a website.
The best tabs are printed under a staff that contains the missing rhythm information (along with the actual pitches, etc., of course). Not exactly concise, but very info-rich.
This is technically true, but is approaching notation from a perspective that everything needs to be specified (I’d call this a “classical” perspective, but even in classical music, this was not traditionally true).
In e.g. Jazz jam sessions, good sight readers can definitely figure out what to play from lead sheets consisting of chord symbols + melody, and in terms of information, those are equivalent to guitar tabs + melody.
Admittedly, there are also books only giving tabs/chord symbols + lyrics (or sometimes not even those), and for this form, I agree that your assessment is valid.
My understanding is that in the big band era, you got fairly large bands (though not as large as 40 members) to play tightly together without undue precision in notation (and often without all members being good readers of sheet music).
