Early on Sweden had more deaths which led people to argue lockdowns worked, but then things subsided and other countries caught up and then surpassed it, leading to Sweden ending up near the bottom of the COVID death league tables (in Europe).

It's also important to remember in all this that the lockdown policy wasn't predicated on making a small difference you need powerful statistics to find. It was advertised as: anyone who doesn't lock down will experience mass deaths and full blown collapse. Epidemiologists claimed Sweden would experience double the usual death rate due to COVID, i.e. as many deaths from COVID as from all other causes combined! Their actual death rate:

https://www.statista.com/statistics/525353/sweden-number-of-...

There's a tiny bump in 2020, but at least part of that is simply noise due to 2019 having an unusually low death rate, so you'd expect it to be higher than normal in 2020 even without COVID.

Yes if you look exactly at the early pandemic then Sweden did worse than its immediate neighbors (but not worse than the rest of the OECD countries). But the real measure of success in policy has to include the rest of the pandemic and its aftermath. The others caught up.