> What confuses me is why so much scrutiny is being placed on the practice of wearing a mask. It just hardly seems like much of an inconvenience.

In my experience it is a big inconvenience. The air is not properly mixed, so one breathes back part of breathed-out air. With (cloth) facemask, i have shortness of breath after running up a staircase, and after 15 min of regular walk i start hyperventilating.

While i wear facemasks and consider it a reasonable measure, the government mandate was sometimes excessive. For example, at the start of the pandemic, the government mandated wearing facemasks everywhere outside of home, even in nature far from other people. I stopped to do recreational walks in nature, as it was just too burdensome to do that with facemask. Fortunately, after several weeks, the government noticed that mandating masks in nature far from other people is nonsense and made some exceptions.