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A cursory google search seems like this working paper (which is not peer reviewed) seems pretty controversial, and lots of the criticisms seem pretty reasonable. They are reviewing a tiny slice of the entire literature, and for apparently no good reason. They say they're looking only at studies using a diff-in-diff approach, but some of them aren't even doing that, which raises the alarm of cherry-picking, especially when a lot of the studies that receive the most weight are from ultra-obscure journals. One of the studies, which it looks like received the most weight of all is from a journal, called 'Sustainability', so rubbish that in Norway it was the among the first 13 journals to be rated as predatory, and is now not even recognised as an academic journal there, having been removed from the national register because it was just a 'gun-for-hire' journal that would publish anything if you paid them for it.
Valids points, and in no way am I saying this paper is perfect or irrefutable.
But I will say;
Control for mainstream/publication bias. The (scientific/)establishment consensus was that NPI's were effective. This was enforced with strong Big-Tech state colluded censorship.
Most if not all the papers that speak positively about lockdowns have similar shortcomings. The only difference is they don't get much if any scrutiny at all. You won't find 50 links "debunking" a popular just as flawed meta analysis as the one I linked.
I think mechanistically even bereft of any empirical analysis, the costs of lockdowns are far too much relative to their benefit. This can be easily argued for. see https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/13571516.2021.1976051?journalCode=cijb20
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