1. What this situation has already shown —on so many levels— is that we humans as a large group can’t be trusted to behave appropriately. Lots of people do follow the rules... but enough don’t, that it means the rules have to be stricter for everybody, so that the troublesome few don’t cause too much of a problem for the whole.
2. Your infection control proposal doesn’t stand up to the real world. Yes, if you could guarantee excellent N95 mask usage, and guarantee excellent hand washing (and other infection control measures - surfaces-hands-face) in everyone not locked down, and guarantee that no vulnerable people had to come to work or were exposed to people that had, and guarantee that people out in the world maintained strict social distancing... then maybe your proposal could work. But per #1 it’s super unlikely that this would be executed anywhere close to 100%... and failures would lead to more people getting sick... and then more people dying.
Also the minute one of your key staff come under a high risk category, gets sick, is isolated, etc... then you need to involve remote work anyway.
IIRC China is enforcing a "1 person per household is allowed outside once every three days for supplies" policy in the most affected areas, has built multiple new hospitals, has implemented multiple cordon sanitaires, locked down millions, has _free_ testing, and is enforcing that testing.
South Korea, Singapore, and Taiwan were among the first to ban flights from China (and given where they are that's MUCH bigger than the US doing so, both politically, and in percentage of flights). They are testing people constantly before they're allowed out of or in to places. They are _enforcing_ quarantines of people with fevers, they are interrogating people that might have been exposed to the disease, and are quarantining based on that, even without symptoms. They have a _lot_ more people staying home than usual. They are accessing people's financial data in real time without warrants.
No one's saying masks make things worse. Given how many masks we have, there's an open question as to whether we should reserve them for medical care providers or not. What people are saying is that masks are not enough. And they're right.