It is glaringly obvious that COVID in 2023 is very different from COVID in the Winter of 2020/2021.
Why this is so is an interesting question, but THAT it is so is beyond dispute.
I have treated >1000 hospitalized COVID patients, the last death was in November 2022 most of them now have the sniffles and are hospitalized for some other reason.
In contrast, we converted 48 floor beds to isolation/oxygen in 2020 to supplement our 20 ICU beds, two days before Christmas 2020 they were all full.
I check worldometer daily for USA..at present number of cases and deaths are dropping slowly. Doesn’t look like a pandemic yet. Most likely the prevalent variant is not causing the historical amounts of cases or deaths.
Your personal experience reinforces that interpretation.