As humans if we'd have locked down properly for a few weeks at the start with the alpha variant we'd probably be done by now.

Globally, we didn't. So now we're in this position. I don't know what the end goal is; Australia proved several times in the past, as did New Zealand, that lockdowns functionally eliminated it. Some states in Australia have still only had a few hundred cases total (with a few million population in the cities) and have been living very normal lives for the past 18 months.

Yes it may jump from animals again but that's a pretty long shot. It requires very special circumstances for those kinds of events. We've globally let the genie out of the bottle; it's too late to put it back in, so realistically the only thing left is to play whack-a-mole with vaccines and hope for the best.