For all CA's not entirely unearned reputation, the main effects on me of CA's and my county's Covid restrictions were:
* The stay-at-home shutdown, which didn't affect me or my family a lot, since we all were "essential workers"; I split WFH and inbuilding work about 50-50 from mid-March through the beginning of June and then back to full-time in-building; HOWEVER, "non-essential workers and businesses" (e.g. restaurants and athletic gyms and event organizers got clobbered, some of which never recovered;
* My employer required masks, which did not bother me much, for wa-a-ayyyyy beyond any potential benefit, however small;
* My employer did require vaccination, AFAIK, the company's decision, not government-mandated; the company requirement was announced about 11 months after vaccines started becoming available and 6 months after I was vaccinated; when the requirement was announced, >/=90% of the employees were already vaccinated, and I did not hear of anyone declining or leaving because of the requirement; in the realm of "I should not need to point this out", I never supported vaccine mandates;
* Referring back to my first point above, at the time I was an active gym user and walked in one or two running events a month; these were shut down; I do not remember when the gym re-opened, but initially it was for limited numbers at a time (appointment?) with equipment cleaned after use; running events resumed as counties determined, e.g. Santa Cruz County in June 2021 but CoCo County in July 2021; to be blunt, one of the lessons that should have been learned from the spring-summer 2020 race and Hate-Trump riots was that outdoor events were very low risk, and running event organizers could easily reduce even that very low risk by corralling and careful food/drink handling (which they already did, pretty much); between Covid in January 2021 and the following ~6 months of no in-person running events, it took me several months after the restart to rebuild my stamina.
TL;DR version of the above, IMO, the over-reaction was extreme, and the various measures could have been mostly backed off by summer 2020. Nazi-like, no, but authoritarian, excessive, and no-thought inflexible, obviously.