Repetitive display of messages as tabs - need to scroll through all messages

Can you show a screen shot? I can't picture what you're describing.

Are you perhaps talking about displaying the message list in Cards Layout rather than Table Layout?

https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/getting-started-thunderbird-main-window-supernova

See <Settings | General | Reading & Display | Open Messages In...>. Do those options give you the desired results?

Thunderbird for desktop OSs and Thunderbird Android are completely different programs. They can't be compared.

Received messages show as tabs - rather than listings and are often repeated ..

I am not sure what is your grievance. Received messages are not automatically shown as tabs, they are displayed in the thread pane in "Table" or in "Cards" view. Your picture shows that you open messages by a double-click to read them in tabs. And much worse: if you use View > Sort By > Threaded and you double-click on a collapsed thread, all single messages of the conversation will be opened in new tabs!

Thunderbird has a built-in feature to automatically restore the previous session upon the next start. So, if you don't close all those message tabs before closing Thunderbird, all of them will be displayed again when launching Thunderbird the next time.

If you want to avoid all those message tabs you may open messages by simple click to read them in the "message pane" instead: To display the message pane hit the F8 key.