Earlier last year, Sweden was being highly praised for its approach, until they ended up with a much higher per-capita death rate than neighbours and comparable countries.
"Sweden deaths in 2020 are up only single-digits against 2018"
Sweden is a low population, sparsely populated country with a relatively wealthy, healthy and homogenous population and the highest percentage of people who live alone of any country.
While Sweden did not lock down like other countries, they issued instructions to reduce travel and work from home if possible, and - as Swedes have an atypically high level of trust in the government - they complied: if you look at Google mobility reports, you find that Sweden's non-mandatory lockdown had a similar real world effect as the various lockdowns in the US and Spain. Sweden was not entirely without lockdown rules either, which got more severe as criticism within the country and from neighbours intensified.
"Hospitals have never been overloaded [..] the potential for hospital overload (beyond what flu waves incur anyway) was also eliminated."
While the hospital system was not overloaded in the UK, individual hospitals were, and the system as a whole came very close to overload during the peaks. Were it not for the first lockdown, and using the time that bought us to massively increase the capacity, they absolutely would have been overloaded.
The hospital my girlfriend works at ran out of PPE, oxygen and staff (due to illness), and the conditions for staff were beyond awful, including multiple of her colleagues in their 40s and up being killed. This isn't just because the UK health system was poorly prepared, prior to the pandemic, we were considered the second most prepared country in the world for a pandemic.
I am not saying lockdown is the right approach -- I don't know, and indeed lockdown carries with it a huge number of economic and health harms. But to characterise this as just a normal flu-season and say that hospitals coped fine is clearly wrong. The only reason hospitals weren't overloaded was because of a combination of heroic efforts from staff and measures to limit the number of incoming patients. One reason the UK likely got so much closer to being overloaded and has a higher number of deaths (besides demographic differences and population density) was that we left it relatively late to lock down and our lock down was relatively tame compared to many in Europe.