Your comment just gave me the idea to: install the container tabs plugin, tell the plugin to always open our Jenkins site in the "Jenkins" container, and then when the bug happens, I can "clear cookies etc" on that container, without destroying my history and login sessions in the rest of my tabs.
After playing around with it for 5 minutes, it seems you can't clear cookies on a container basis. Also apparently only cookies are isolated, but other bits of history aren't. So this might not work. Alas. I almost found a solution. I did find that ctrl-shift-del opens a clear history popup though, instead of going through that wretched menu.