However the mortality rate normalized as the total number of infections rose. It mostly killed off people in groups that were high risk. That's almost tautological - the people in those groups may not even have known they were high risk prior to COVID though.
In other words: if the purpose of the response to COVID was to prevent deaths, we largely failed. If the purpose of the response was to contain CoV-2, we definitely failed. In retrospect, the function if not the purpose of the response was to delay the spread and enable immunization from vaccines. I wouldn't call it a success, especially not globally due to the hesitance to waive patent restrictions for poorer countries, but it was less of a failure than the other two possible purposes of the response.
Of course the problem is that while the rightwing meme of "is it FROM COVID or WITH COVID" is already difficult enough to deal with, measuring the impact of COVID on patients who did not die is even more difficult because we not only can't fully know what variables we're looking for but those variables are also likely to be extremely difficult to isolate, especially given the stress of being in a pandemic, news coverage about the pandemic and the measures enacted as a response to the pandemic.