And as others have noted, so far Sweden looks pretty good. They are higher than nearby neighbors but lower than most large EU counties with much less disruption. It remains to be seen whether they are better able to save their bars, restaurants, and hotels than others that shutdown.
Can we agree that if you're going to compare Sweden (population 10 million) with countries with 5-6x greater population then it is reasonable to also compare it with countries of about the same population, or a bit less, say down to 5 million?
In that case:
EU countries with higher death rates than Sweden: Belgium, Spain, Italy, France.
EU countries with lower death rates than Sweden: Netherlands, Ireland, Portugal, Denmark, Austria, Romania, Finland, Hungary, Czechia, Poland, Bulgaria, Greece, Slovakia.
If you like, you can add UK to the first list as being "nearly EU", but I'm then going to add Norway and Switzerland to the second list. The fact is that among *comparably-sized* countries, which do not necessarily have some of the coordination problems that those with 50 million people do, Sweden is the second-worst performer in the world.
Of course, at another level none of this means anything anyway, because testing protocols and cause-of-death certification differ, some countries are further along the curve than others, etc etc. But if you want to argue that Sweden made the right choice, the way to do it would appear to be on the basis that "everyone is going to get the disease anyway", which is at least empirically defensible. The argument that they are someone avoiding basically the same economic and public health catastrophe as everyone else, is not.