Short answer is Yes, this is what GuidedTour is for.

Here is a compiled list of features that I think would be useful in our case. (steps ~ popups)

• Tours can be started on the server or client side. A cookie can be set to start the tour on the next page load.
• You can start a tour in any specific step ( I see this working for us to trigger different steps depending on the tab )
• Steps don't necessarily have to be connected ( we can have various steps for one tab and not be connected to the steps in a different tab)
• The order of steps can be set conditionally or re-arranged. They can also be skipped conditionally
• There is no need to have a hard dependency on the GuidedTour extension (and we shouldn't).
• There are config options and events we can use to personalize the experience

I want to point out that the extension documentation is really good and the examples give you a good picture of what can be done

Links
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:GuidedTour
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:GuidedTour/Write_an_extension_tour
https://doc.wikimedia.org/GuidedTour/master/js/#!/api/mw.guidedTour

Other links for reference
https://github.com/wikimedia/mediawiki-extensions-WikimediaMessages/blob/master/modules/rcfilters-highlight-tour.js
https://github.com/wikimedia/mediawiki-extensions-WikimediaMessages/blob/master/modules/rcfilters-intro-tour.js

Starting a tour thru a hook. This tour is in core and the dependency on the extension is not allowed (I don't think we need this but just in case)
https://github.com/wikimedia/mediawiki-extensions-WikimediaMessages/blob/master/includes/WikimediaMessagesHooks.php#L1424