Doing health checks and restricting foreign nationals arriving from specific high risk areas is not extreme at all, that has been done plenty of times. I don't think it is comparable at all to the unprecedented restrictions that become normal in the last 1-2 years.

>Do you think it would have been OK to implement restrictions at the start of the pandemic, just not now?

Yes. In the beginning nobody knew how dangerous the virus was, so risk management should have been much more strict. It could have been a virus orders of magnitude worse than covid.