Discouraging is one thing, but they discouraged with a false made up reason (masks don't work). Supposedly their real motivations were: if we say to use masks, then people will just distance less and spread more; and healthcare workers need the masks that do work right now. It would have been better if they simply admitted the true reasons at the time.

Remember that in the beginning there was an enormous shortfall of the masks that were known to be effective in preventing respiratory disease. The CDC (and others) were very worried about medical personnel not being able to get them, very justifiably in hindsight. Just imagine how much worse the (already bad) panic buying of masks would have made it if the CDC had told everyone to mask up.

We absolutely did not know that cloth masks would help. We (incorrectly) thought that anything less than a N95 mask would not help at all, and so that is what was communicated. Since then we have done a lot of science and have learned that while N95 masks are a lot better than, say, double-layered cloth masks, the latter are still much better than nothing in slowing down infection rates.

We also were very focused on the effects for the wearer of masks. We were not focused on the effects of a possible spreader wearing the masks. Part of this was that all of the previous pandemics had diseases that people were symptomatic when they spread the disease. With Covid-19 we have a disease the mostly spreads when people are a-symptomatic. So the potential spreaders are the ones who most need to be wearing masks, and since we can't tell them apart, we need everyone in masks.

All of these things are things we learned along the way. Harping on the CDC (or others) for not knowing them is just wrong. For some of the references here please see:

https://www.wired.com/story/the-teeny-tiny-scientific-screwu...

No, it's absolutely right to harp on the CDC for this. If you intentionally tell a lie to people in order to manipulate them into doing something for what you think is the greater good, you set your own reputation on fire. The truth about what you did will come out, and for everything you say from that point on to pretty much a generation of people, everyone will constantly second-guess whether you are once again telling a lie to serve what you might think is some greater good. Getting a semblance of that reputation back is a slow and painful process.

Haven't the horrors of history given enough examples? The ends do not justify the means. Lies like this have most definitely already backfired hard. Anyone who thinks they are some special elite who is entitled to lie to the public for the greater good is wrong, evil, and unfit to hold any sort of power.