When you talk today's popular music bass tab, you are talking in general simple lines compared to many other instruments. Tab on a 6 string guitar is far more critical as the sound of the note by string and fret can be very different, especially with any level of distortion. Yeah, and much of it is not "efficient" to play.
Tab was developed to solve a need in history. I remember seeing tab for lute which predated the guitar.
You can still use tab for any instrument which has the same notes at several different places on the "neck" with or without frets. Consider also the Xylophone, which is very popular in jazz and Latin music and can have 4 octaves.
Piano music does not use tab that I am aware of, but its music has octave notations to show where to play the notes assuming standard hand positions. Get into extremes of hand positions, and they even use forms of tab. The big difference is that pianos do not have the same notes in different places like most necked, stringed instruments do, unless you play a one-string washtub bass.
If you are working on a piece of music and you find the tab wrong, then make your own tab corrections. When I started playing guitar back in 1960--- tab was not available to be right or wrong, and most pop music books were written by piano players, and the cords were piano chords, not guitar-possible chords. Times are better now. Whatever you can buy means there are enough people who will pay for it.
Many times tabs are produced as a second effort from software like Finale, a SN software, and takes more steps to correct to proper placement tabs. What you get on first pass may be the proper first-octave notes (frets 0-5) but not the proper placement for the proper timbre in the produced rendition.
WRONG TAB: Otherwise tab is wrong on web sites in an attempt to get around paying royalties. On some sites if you buy the premium subscription you can get a higher quality tab. But "cheap" string players delight in free versions that stiff the original writers to debase the music business that they otherwise would have paid royalties to when they bought the correct tab.
So you do not get tabs that are accidently wrong; they are intentionally wrong. If this keeps up then the music business for recordings that sell may collapse. Oh, for many, it already has. But if that is your style, then you will never get "correct" tabs until you are ready to pay for it.
Now if you get something like a Hal Lenard book, the tabs are usually good to at least 1/16 note resolution. But if you cannot find books that you might want that simply means the publisher determined that there are not enough people who will actually pay money to get that music by paying for it.
Yes, you do get what you pay for.
Back in the 60's the the only way to learn was by ear, there was nothing that really worked on guitar, much less bass, expect for some jazz or classical double bass music. Even cello music has notation for what strings/frets to play certain notes on (tab).
BASS SHRED: If most of your music is on frets 1-12, then maybe you don't need tab often, but add frets 13-24, and it is very helpful, especially if you are doing music like Paganini or Legnani with large jumps.
These guys shred and are copied in some metal music. I have seen metal bass players who exactly double N4N the 6 string players at high bpm (1/16 notes at 280 bpm). If you want to play exactly N4N the metal shredders, then you decide if tab helps or not.
Now where did those shredding metal bass players get the music to copy note 4 note? They are often music school students/graduates who can do it themselves, or hired somebody to create that SN and/or tab for them. One way or the other they paid for it.
USING TAB: Here is a sample SN and tab from Band In a Box (BIAB) for a song we did for a Christmas concert. It is a jazz walking bass line done by BAIB's pro jazz bass player in their Smokey Nightclub Jazz style. And they paid him for the rights, that is why BAIB is not free.
The tab is above the SN line. I admit BAIB may not/or may have a metal style that the OP may want, but it does show how I used SN and tab to learn this part. If I had just used SN I would have done this on the low 5-7 frets with a standard box pattern; with tab I used 12 frets and got some of those lovely slides.
And if I wanted a bass solo I could have moved it all up 12 frets.
I used BAIB to give the band this in a cord chart with the treble-clef melody line. We played it jazz, and the audience sang and clapped with it anyway. For us that was a great night. And nobody went to the hospital.
I used the tab to learn this faster. Or I could have spent much longer trying to do it on my own. But I would have been held back by my own "efficiencies" (read habit patterns) that never would have got it.
BTW we did this instrumental as I am the lead singer and I could not play this walking line and sing to. I could have if I had used 1-5 bass lines, but not full neck walks. Now if humming sells, maybe I could.
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But if you play bass, "money" notes in the low 5 frets, you may not need tab for very long. But start adding 2 and 3 octave shred and you may wish you had it.
My suggestion, learn to read SN and tab if you want lots of better paying gigs. If you want to be a lower paid musician, don't.
For me, I no longer love splitting a cheap bar gig $100 - $150, 3-5 ways that usually does not even cover the gas. And forget new strings! My goal is not that my job supports my music habit. I want my music to support my other habits. YRMV.
but neither are you really 'balancing' the thing properly the way it was meant to be used --- where you have all the control re: where you're headed, how fast you're traveling, how to lean into a turn, when to 'coast' (with no hands! 
), etc.
