Since it looks like Sweden is going to abandon that strategy we'll never know. I see no reason why the strategy wouldn't work in the long run but the days where a few thousand people for love of country will be willing to take the fall and hold the line are long gone.
Had Sweden continued, we would have had a natural experiment — one, which would have served as a control group to test the utility of the extreme-social-distancing strategy. I’m not, in any way, advocating against social distancing — but, it is interesting to note that there is no equivalent of the double-blind randomly-assigned control group clinical studies being used to test the malaria drugs, etc. IOW, the evidence favouring the social-distancing strategy is anecdotal.