Reading the links you have posted in #25 sycophant... reading them in totality I don't think they quite make the case you think they are making.
One was more an opinion piece that loosely pulled facts together, but really didn't address the issue of comparing masks wearing regions to non wearing regions.
One then compared Kansas which had regions without mandates and some with. Those with had a lower infection rate, but stated...
"Carroll cautions that this was not a randomized, controlled study and there could have been other factors at play (such as more physical distancing in social situations and fewer large gatherings) in the counties that were enforcing masks."
Also, this was a mandate vs no mandate. The other article you post states:
"Epidemiological studies often use government mask mandates as a proxy for mask wearing. However, the existing literature on the relationship between mandates and actual levels of mask wearing has shown surprisingly weak effects. For example, studying US states, ref. 22 failed to find a statistically significant relationship between mandates and subsequent wearing, while other studies found postmandate increases in wearing of just 13% (23) and 23% (24). Betsch et al. (25) find a 40% increase in wearing after local mandates in Germany, but no other study finds a comparably large increase. Given that the link between mandates and wearing is surprisingly weak, it is likely that the link between mandates and transmission is difficult to detect. Three additional factors lead us to suspect that a link between mandates and transmission would be difficult to detect. First, introducing a mandate is a coarse, one-off event that necessarily loses signal by not tracking day-to-day changes in mask wearing. We also have fewer data on mandates: Less than half of the regions we study enforced any mandate during the study period. Second, past studies treat mandates as a binary on/off intervention that is fully implemented at a single point in time. However, modeling the effect of mandates as an instantaneous change in the reproduction number or mortality fails to capture changes in wearing behavior following the announcement of a mandate but before its enforcement (21). Nor does it account for gradual change in behavior after the implementation of a mandate. Finally, the circumstances of mandate policies are highly heterogeneous, both in terms of the preexisting level of voluntary wearing at the time of implementation and in terms of how exactly they are defined, enforced, and complied with. Consequently, averaging the international effect of mandates based on coarse data is unlikely to provide a useful summary of heterogeneous mandate effects. Importantly, these arguments point to the link between mandates and transmission being difficult to detect, not that it is absent."
A lot to unpack there... but basically it weakens the link to mandates being a good proxy for mask wearing.
Seems we really should be comparing large geographical areas, with long timeframes mask mandates. This would remove a lot of the issues raised and cautioned by the authors in your relevant links.
Sweet seems we agree then that a cost to exercise a right doesn't matter if it's for the public good. Let's get those voter ID cards.