Masks are only helpful if pretty much every asymptomatic carrier is wearing one. If even a few people are asymptomatic carriers but not wearing a mask, they can potentially infect everyone they come into contact with, mask or no mask. If you can't get people not to respect physical distancing enough even for self-preservation, then you're not going to get them all to wear masks.
And meanwhile, that's billions of masks that are far more effectively used in the health care industry.
That's kind of the antithesis of saying they were never stringent to begin with, you know...
An opinion pieces and an explanation of a cultural stigma. Neither one of those contradicts the statement you bolded, because neither of those are examples of health officials telling people that masks are effective for civilian use.
Culturally, Asian countries are far more likely to listen to the advice of physical distancing and adequate washing in addition to the observed social stigma of not wearing a mask. Without that kind of adherence, those masks are effectively wasted in the US, especially as more than a few people will entertain a false sense of security while wearing the mask and potentially cause and/or receive more harm therefor.
We can agree on that. Trump's whole excuse for firing the CDC's Pandemic Response Unit was that those people would be "easy to hire back if we needed them". But that excuse goes out the window when he refuses to do things that need to be done at the very start of the emergency. Either you're the kind of person who can get the ball rolling ASAP, or you're not. Now we're in the worst of all cases because he pretended he would be that kind of person, when he is nothing of the kind.
Sure, it's true that they were caught off-guard. But I don't believe for a second that any warning they would have provided would have been adequate enough to sway the people in control of the purse-strings in DC.