The studies that have been done have shown that whatever benefits that lockdowns may have had were far outweighed by the toll they've taken on mental health and the economy. Short of literally locking everyone in their houses for 2-3 weeks (including essential workers) lockdowns just feel like they're doing something.
I have seen this claimed a lot, but is it really true? In some countries the authorities ended restrictions (or ostensibly maintained restrictions but stopped enforcement of them) because the population simply wasn't observing them. In those cases just "giving up" really worked in terms of the majority of people being able to get back to normal socializing.