Regarding the surgeon general quote, if you understand that he's referring to protective masks (such as N95s) and their capacity -- and it's pretty clear that he is -- the contents of his statement holds up very well, even now. PPE is extra crucial for those working around infected people. Most members of the general public are unlikely to use N95s in such a way they'd be significantly protective (after watching how most people wear any kind of mask including x95s, I don't know anyone could argue differently, and that's before you get into the kind of fit testing that people who count on these things professionally do and speak of as difficult).

What happened subsequently was a shift to cooperative masks whose benefit is primarily reducing transmission from the wearer.

These two things are both discussed under the header of "masks" but they are very different interventions. It's less that the position changed, it's more that what authorities were actually talking about changed.

You can fairly argue that this counts as a messaging failure and I'd agree, but a lot of people seem to be missing what the issue actually was (especially some who set this up as dishonesty or an attack on expertise).

Many N95s have valves that aren't permissable as COVID masks anyways. They are mostly designed to keep pollution out rather than your breath off of other people.

I for one, am glad that N95s haven't been mandated. I found them extremely irritating when I had to wear them because of high pollution in Beijing. The masks we wear instead, in comparison, are much more comfortable.

This all makes sense when you remember that the scientific belief at the time were that COVID was spread through droplets and not aerosol.

They later had evidence that COVID was aerosol transmitted - masks for everyone make more sense in that scenario.