The point of masks was always to limit community spread, principally to prevent a situation where hospitals are so full you can't treat regular issues like car

The point of masks was always to limit community spread, principally to prevent a situation where hospitals are so full you can't treat regular issues like car crash victims. In practice that means you do try to keep vulnerable people out of the hospital but it's not the main concern if you're goal is to prevent a really bad public health situation. Masks and social distancing absolutely had an effect on the situation, and the main reason we had to do unfocused solutions as you call them is because people infected with Covid did not always have symptoms, and it was extremely contagious. If algae is exponentially covering a pond, it covers half the pond the day before it covers the whole pond. The exponential nature of infection is really hard to reason about and I think people like you really aren't understanding that at the time, with no vaccines, the only way to protect the most vulnerable was to reduce community spread. You also don't have a magic eight ball telling you who might get hospitalized. We had really fit people dying in two weeks. There was no way to tell who was and wasn't vulnerable.