China's zero-CoVID policy involved a lot more finesse than "bone-headed lockdowns."
After the initial Wuhan outbreak was brought under control in early 2020, the vast majority of people in China didn't experience another lockdown until well into 2022. Life was actually much more normal in China for most of the pandemic than people in the West tend to think. It was much more normal than in the West for much of the first two years of the pandemic.
From spring 2020 until spring 2022, the main measures were 2-3 weeks of quarantine for people arriving in China, contact-tracing (supported by smartphone apps), and large-scale PCR testing (imagine testing everyone in a city of 10 million people in 3 days, and then doing it again). Lockdowns were rare until mid-2022, and were reserved for situations in which the other measures weren't enough.
That strategy worked extremely well for a long time - long enough to develop vaccines and administer them to 90% of the population.
I don't know when the decision was made to transition out of zero-CoVID, but the transition began in November 2022. It appears that the government initially wanted to do a slow transition, but then decided to completely open the floodgates in early December 2022. The fact that the virus spread so rapidly after that decision is a pretty dramatic demonstration of just how effective the measures were beforehand. After they lifted control measures, everyone was infected within two months.