A seldom expressed idea is that maybe we acted close to optimally throughout this whole thing. I hesitated to write that, because I know someone will bring up a case where an official lied or there was widespread corruption (and I still welcome such arguments)...

But, some mistakes pushed us towards too much lock-down, and some mistakes pushed us towards too little lock-down, and perhaps they balanced out to something close to optimal. Not only in the case of lock-downs, but in other things too: surely some executive acted with primary concern for profits, and surely some others spread baseless anti-vax conspiracies. Maybe they balance out?

Maybe society is like a huge machine learning model. It has many errors, sometimes it estimates too high, sometimes it estimates too low. We are always striving to correct both types of errors, but the errors do not stop us from finding an approximate middle path which is often good enough.