The main problem with lockdowns is they were all started too late. The aim of a lockdown should be to stop the disease spreading rapidly, but little point when there are multiple cases everywhere. Having said that, whenever lockdowns started, infection rates soon began to fall. Also, hard to provide adequate health services when bodies are piling up in hospital corridors. Early, targeted lockdowns would have slowed the spread and allowed area with few or no cases to operate normally.
I saw what was happening in China and took precautions in January 2020. Air travel was to blame for the spread of Covid world wide in the first couple of months in 2020; countries like the UK carried on as if nothing was happening, then panicked (blame the government). Eventually, nearly everybody caught Covid, but those who caught it later had the advantages of vaccination and less severe strains. In 2020, the death rate was around 1%, without any lockdowns or other restrictions, the global death toll would have probably exceeded 10 million in that year alone.
The first step in all outbreaks of serious disease is quarantine, that has been the case for hundreds of years. Prevention before cure.
Forcing all businesses to close was perhaps to Draconian, but efforts to decrease human to human direct interactions should have been heavily promoted.