However, models of "value of life vs. other-thing" are almost always useless.
Why? Because you don't care about that question. You care about other questions.
And, crucially, the models you use to answer those other questions tend to have so much uncertainty that your model of "value of life vs. other-thing" turns out to not really contribute anything useful to the analysis.
If I ask for a policy that maximizes the value of some function $f(x) = \theta_1 * x^n + \theta_2 * c$, for example, then will you focus your effort on modeling $n$ or $c$? What if I tell you that the best you can do is get $n$ down to an interval $[-100, 100]$? Will you then go on to think a bunch about what to do with $c$, especially if you know that whatever $c$ is it's probably between -1 and 1?
My suggestion is that, in most cases, "value of life vs. other-thing" is the $c$ in this example.
In the case of COVID, you want all your smart modelers thinking about how to minimize the chance of protected exponential growth within any region. If you do that, you have the right answer. The exact trade-off between lives and other things doesn't matter because, with covid, __preventing localized protected exponential growth is always the right answer__. The "lives vs other-thing" question is a complete distraction in the decision space.
> I can't pull anything out of this other than "models are useless, so don't bother", which is a non-answer.
Is it? Models are always modeling something! Modeling the effect of reddit meme spread on covid-19 spread is probably useless. That doesn't mean cluster SIR models are useless.
Don't model things that don't help you make decisions.