Exactly this. The government cried wolf on a massive scale, which dwarfed Tony Blair's legacy of "please believe in my weapons of mass destruction". I will never believe, respect or trust any government again, and I certainly won't believe in any "emergency" or "crisis" that the government tells us about for a long, long time, especially if they use it to impose restrictions. Remember the "emergency alerts" which were a novelty? I am opposed to them as a matter of principle, that they might be misused to impose a future state of fear. If it hadn't been for 2020, I might now be thinking they are a good idea.
The government crossed so many lines which we believed were uncrossable. In one day, they destroyed everything, and then used gaslighting, fearmongering and moving the goalposts to prolong lockdowns way beyond anything we could have imagined, throwing in increasingly absurd measures like taping up park benches (all that plastic waste). Nobody in government had the guts to say "actually, things are not as bad as we thought, lockdowns are doing more harm than good, and we don't want a second wave to happen in winter." They felt they had to maintain the myth "you will kill Granny if you enjoy yourselves at all". It seemed that between England, Scotland and Wales, there was a kind of competition to impose as much misery as they could.
And while we might be back to a "kind of normal" now, with a few remnants of "social distancing" signs still in place, there is still the Sword of Damocles hanging over us: all this could happen again. NONE of lockdown's cheerleaders have admitted to the multiple harms it caused, they're all saying "because of the pandemic". Although people are saying they probably wouldn't obey another lockdown because of Partygate (which was a useful deflection: the real scandal was not the parties, but the absurd rules, which the government knew were absurd; they were not worried about killing their grannies), I don't think it would take much fearmongering, possibly about a totally different threat, for the public to be pleading for lockdowns and state handouts again. The precedent of the government "saving them" has been set.
Yes, there was a virus. Yes, it probably killed people. But lockdown killed people as well. The "cure" was much, much worse than the virus, and I am now far more terrified of what future governments might do than any virus. I have not forgotten that the party which is now in power had NOT A SINGLE WORD to say about the harms of lockdowns: all they had to say was that lockdowns didn't go far enough, and they opposed easing of restrictions at every turn. They are having to deal with a huge financial mess, and they are keeping very quiet about how some of that was due to the lockdowns which they cheered on.
And I think that one massive change is that some people, including myself, are much more sceptical than before. It was obvious that the government was choosing carefully which scientists they allowed to speak and back up the cause of lockdown; any who dared to speak against lockdowns were silenced. You could watch BBC interviewers cutting people off if there was any hint of them deviating from the official narrative. I now do not believe anything I hear on the news; indeed, I avoid news at all, because now, I am much more aware that only one side of the argument is always presented. The people often referred to as "conspiracy theorists" are now feeling more justified than ever before. I myself attended several of the anti-lockdown marches. The BBC (the government's telescreen) either did not report on these at all, or said "a couple of hundred conspiracy theorists on Speaker's Corner". One march was about forty people wide, and literally miles long. I know, because I saw it with my own eyes. Easily hundreds of thousands of people, and not "conspiracy theorists", but ordinary people concerned for the future of their children, and what future governments might do to them.