And then it goes on because measures are reduced, and zero-covid never was a goal... would even go so far that some few countries pretty successfully did zero-covid strategies and stopped their virus, though sure, that is a pretty futile thing if the world is not "globally" doing this and you are likely not isolating forever/completely - so we just start to live with it.
Statstically speaking, almost surely yes: with millions of infections there are thousands of variants, every day. If somebody was prevented from infecting somebody with their variant (as patient 0) technically we stopped variants with lockdown. Maybe they more favorable for us, maybe they were more dangerous from us.