Rewind about 3 years... the supermarkets are empty with long socially distanced queues outside. You can only go for "essential" shopping. Children don't have access to school, play areas or friends. Benches are taped up. You are allowed out once a day for exercise but the exact legality of that is unclear. The curtain twitchers and keyboard warriors impose their own layer of rules and are quick to shame people not following their interpretations of them. People weren't allowed to form "bubbles" for two months leaving single people totally alone. Many people found themselves frozen out of bubbles to limp along in isolation. Elderly, ill and vulnerable people were isolated away in care and health settings where they could be neglected unchallenged,
often wasting away in confused lonliness. Many people never saw their vulnerable relatives again. Funerals at peoples' darkest time of grief were heavily restricted with 2m distances strongly enforced.
Anyone speaking up about the cost of restrictions, people struggling, going out of business, neglect, abuse, depression were met by a strong chorus of catchphrases like "people are dying", "children are resiliant", "stay the fuck at home and watch Netflix"
So many of the restrictions made no practical difference to any viral spread and a lot was very clear from very early on. Anything involving restricting people in open spaces was a total waste of time and unnecessary misery.
The AD threads originated from an AIBU about people sucking joy. People revelling in policing others over made up trivial rules that just made life harder, such as people being vilified for buying "non-essential" Easter Eggs, or staying out longer than the 1 hour non rule about exercise. They were somewhere where people could admit how bloody tough those relentless months were. A space where you could say that so many measures made no sense and were going to cause harm. It was about the only space where people could say that. A free-flowing chat where it was OK to not be OK about what was going on, and where there was no escape from it.
So much of what we were abused for believing in 2020/21 has stood the test of time. The Whatsapp files show the political and flippant, not epidemiological reasons behind many of the rules imposed. We already know exactly how seriously Downing Street took social distancing, masks and essential functions. Inquests and trials regarding neglect resulting in deaths of people frozen out of the public services that could have saved them.
If people want to wear masks, test, wipe shopping, avoid crowds still, that's their free choice as it always was, but thank goodness it is no longer imposed and enforced by state and social policing.