I'd imagine that scaling up ICU capacity has to be more efficient than constantly enacting mandates on the entire population for a decade.

Pandemics are an exponential process, so scaling capacity linearly buys you only a few days or weeks of time unless the exponential is controlled. It's not useless, but it's also decidedly not a lone solution.

That also doesn't account for the damage people contracting the virus accumulate that doesn't register on that metric.

There isn't any evidence that covid would continue to grow exponentially at this point if measures are removed. There are entire states where there are no measures, and it hasn't gone exponential there, even with low vaccination rates. The places with the strictest measures right now also have the highest vaccination rates.

I'm willing to entertain this idea, but random chance has played a big role so far. Personally, I think we should be aiming for elimination in the human population given the damaging effects of long covid in mild cases.