I agree with you completely. If we had our eyes on the ball, we would have been looking carefully at everything that might have been significant when lockdowns were first implemented. Personally I had a surreal experience going cycling with my daughter in UK, May 2020, within exercise and family group regulations, along roads already being taken over by flowering weeds, garden walls draped with flowering mass, and the air smelling like, well, something I’d never smelled since I was in early teens, almost forty years earlier. I had memories suppressed since those days triggered by smells in the air which had been gone, since then. It is indescribable, the smell of really fresh air, when we’ve been denied it so long. We also saw on the news, brief items on recovery of coral and fish stocks, which prior to then was not thought possible. And in markets, the oil price went negative, for the first time ever. Another event we thought was impossible.
What made it all possible was free money. Everyone was being paid to stay home.
That is why I firmly believe now that free money is a necessary part of the solution, and if we look hard enough we can see how it will work.
Anyone can read more about "Kardashev Money" by searching it out.