That's completely false to my understanding. It reminds me of people saying that people got all worked up about y2k and then nothing happened. Nothing happened because everyone fixed their shit. In the beginning of covid hospitals were overwhelmed and the variants were more dangerous. Now large percentages of people are vaccinated and new variants are less dangerous.

I am sure some lock down rules and some implementations of them were not good. But "live with it" was not the same back then as now.