We need to get over that cognitive dissonance. You said it yourself, "Europe came out too fast, opened everything and told everyone to go on holiday as things were fine. Unfortunately community spread was still happening."
What you're not catching is that those numbers are seasonal and were in decline before the lock downs ever started, otherwise it would have spread like wildfire when the lock downs were lifted. This was a (blatantly obvious) trick employed with masks as well, impose the measures right after numbers start dropping to give the public the impression they're working. This has been on display for all to see and many have picked up on it, but the mainstream news isn't feeding you this information - you have to piece the data together yourself.
The Quebec provincial government, for example, was very amateurish at pulling this off and made it easy to spot such moves, the "conservatives" reluctantly pushed into this madness and making laughable PR errors along the way that exposed this fraud for what it is. I have no doubt many others here have caught this happening where they live.
You're not seeing the full picture and that's the way the government wants it. That's what you should be seeing. They've hidden some very important facts from you since the very beginning and it doesn't take much effort to pull some of those up. Cut out the middle man because his interest has absolutely nothing to do with public health.
PCR tests with Ct values of 35+ and binary results are sold to you daily as a "gold standard," positive results falsely interpreted as infectious cases. Maybe it's different where you live, but both the governments and the news media lie to the public each and every day by reporting them as such. That's not educating/informing the public, it's intentionally misleading.
No one following this pandemic for more than a few hours can reasonably claim they're unaware of how those tests are being misused, but don't take my word for it - note Fauci at around the 48 second mark: