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It is kinda interesting that the two examples you brought up don't actually mention the conditions that brought serious controversy (eg Kelsey's family separation, 'kids in cages' conditions) during the Obama presidency. Instead, the objection is just that he wasn't maximally dgaf about illegal immigration, or to an extent wasn't able to be maximally dgaf because of legal restriction.
A claim presented without evidence can be dismissed... well, I'm not going to say as readily, because I'd like higher standards of discourse, here, but I'll again point to all the people who didn't complain even as things got -- often dramatically! -- worse have names or at least nom de plumes present before this week.
'It wouldn't have worked' is not a good argument, any more than it would have been a reasonable cause for me to duck out here.
I was (and to a lesser extent remain) a COVID hawk, if a bit more libertarian-minded a one ('changing hearts and minds' rather than arresting people has a lot to commend it!). Whether COVID measures were or were not 'right' is an entirely different question than what you're running into here.
If we're supposed to care about process, it matter if the Biden administration paid attention to the process. It matters if the Biden admin told the Supreme Court, while trying to maintain a stay of a lower court decision holding a policy unlawful, said that they wouldn't extend the policy, and then just remade the same one with the serial numbers filed off. Left-leaning people here actually believed it (or at least pretended). It matters if Newsom gets to cancel Easter one year, get slapped down by SCOTUS for putting much heavier restrictions on religious organizations than bike shops, does the exact same thing a second year, gets slapped down a second time, and instead comes back with the same policy with the serial numbers filed off. In many other cases, state or federal regulations were pushed at length and then gamed through mootness so that they could not be challenged at all, either by revising the policy trivially faster than courts could react, or requiring behaviors in time periods that made judicial redreasability impossible.
Yeah, it'd suck if sometimes process leads to less-than-perfectly-ideal results! But that's what principles are; if they never cost you anything, they're just convenient slogans. Not least of all because no small number of your political opponents have different ideas of what those ideal results are!
It's not like COVID is alone, here; if you really want to draw some one-off exception to just that, I can give similar lists for (and, indeed, the "just arrest everyone" example above is unrelated to COVID!). The Saga of Defense Distributed likewise turns on 'oh, this settlement the federal government signed? Doesn't count, now'.
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