>The article paints those measures as if they were a good thing and now things have regressed.

I got a totally different vibe: Japan is notoriously xenophobic and maintained extremely strict regulations on visitors that were far more stringent than western countries.

So the framing here sounds like a Japanese perspective: "we didn't want you to come, and we started to let you back in, and look what happened to us" which is probably a popular sentiment there.