My point is that all of this is devilishly multi-variate, and it will be a while before we can disentangle everything and determine what exactly works and why.

People saying "NZ's lockdowns worked" without actually having done the hard part is not helping.

Said from NZ, we did the hard hard part.

How do you think we eradicated community covid several times?

The "hard part" being crunching the numbers and working to falsify your hypotheses, not lockdowns in this context.

This would seem to be quite obviously correct. Perhaps this comment’s downvoters could explain why they disagree?