Right, but it's only barely lower than France, about half-way between Germany and France. And then there's the question whether France is a great comparison; if you compare Sweden to its closer neighbors Finland and Norway - it's much, much worse off; and even compared to the more densely populated Denmark it's almost twice as bad. At best, the numbers look mediocre for Sweden - and that's if you somehow make the case it's more comparable to France+Germany than, say, Norway or Denmark. But if you consider other Nordic countries as baselines, the results look terrible.

Put it this way: imagine somebody gave you the data for deaths for many of the nearby countries, and lots of information about them all; vaccination rates, age distributions etc. The only number missing is Sweden's death rate. Would you have guessed it correctly? or guessed higher? or lower? I definitely would have guesses lower, somewhere between 2 to three times too low. Frankly, even with knowledge that their lockdowns were lax I would not have expected this high a death rate; after all it's not like it was business as usual or anything - people were socially distancing.

I'd say comparing countries like this is fraught, but also that Sweden has an unexpectedly high death toll. Whether it's high in absolute numbers, and what exactly the cause is... who knows. The cause may well be largely unrelated to their policies; clearly the differences between countries in general are not at all easily explained by policy differences, after all. But I don't agree with your statement that it outright doesn't have a high death toll.