For the sake of clarity, the "official" strategy was not so much "do the right thing" as a multipronged one:
- to make sure the elderly and other groups at risk were adequately protected (something which failed to a large extent, causing the high death toll relative to neighboring countries)
- to make sure hospitals and hospital staff were not overwhelmed
- to otherwise minimize detrimental effects to the society in general: i.e. not try to eradicate the virus at high cost and great disruption, which means letting it wash through the population.
It is the latter bullet which has been interpreted as a "herd immunity" strategy, but the official response to this has been one of plausible deniability: it is only a positive side effect of the main strategy.
But internal memos reveal that herd immunity was very much expected and hoped for, with wildly exaggerated estimates of the immunity level galore all through spring.
Over summer and well into the fall it seemed that the strategy would be successful, and that Sweden stood to gain a considerable relative advantage through high levels of immunity among "socially active individuals", and would not need to implement lockdowns like comparable countries. Only over the last few weeks has this hope been thoroughly squashed.
"The Swedish experiment" which was not based on precaution but more on hopes has definitely failed.
It doesn't stop a lot of Swedes from sticking to the official narrative (with a fervor), but it should not fool anyone by now.