That's a feature, not a bug. One of the things I dislike about Chrome is this tendency to auto-close two or three tabs if you cannot easily control how many times you click rapidly. That is, I can somewhat reliably double click, but fairly often an intended single click becomes a double click instead, or a double becomes a triple. (I thought my father had a lot of trouble learning the difference between single and double click back in the 90s, even while he protested that he knew the difference, but now I totally understand why he wasn't following directions...). Having the next tab's close button typically not land under the pointer prevents this from happening most of the time, but I'm glad they put some thought into this and enforced a delay before the second click would close the tab.
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.
Yep, my guess is that it's a failsafe for those "always double-click everything" people like my mother. Taskbar icons, submit buttons, hyperlinks, dock icons, EVERYTHING.
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.