I've also noticed that when switching to another tab, the page has been unloaded. This used to happen only when I had 40+ tabs open. But now it happens even with < 10 tabs. The lag when opening a tab also happens regardless of number of open tabs. This lag is happening even with low power mode disabled.
Other parts of the interface lag too, but none are as immediately noticeable as the new tab button. I can't be sure, but I think there's even some lag when typing in this textarea...
EDIT: Suspecting this was due to memory usage, I closed all tabs (including in private browsing session), then closed every backgrounded app (haven't had to do that since iOS9), then did a hard reboot. Performance seems to be okay for now. Still weird, I've never had to manually do that kind of cleanup before.