Unfortunately, for some it's devolved into that. But there's plenty of experimental evidence that even homemade masks can filter out droplets of aerosols. Here's a study that came out a few days ago looking at the filtration efficiency of 32 different materials.
https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acsnano.0c05025
Many of these materials do a good job capturing materials around 1 micron in size, which is the typical size of water droplets that viruses are bound with, see here for a good explanation of how viruses travel:
Fact check: N95 filters are not too large to stop COVID-19 particles
They also do a good job of reducing the range of respiratory jets, which can can travel as far as 12 feet when coughing. These researchers created a really cool visual of droplet range:
Visualizing the effectiveness of face masks in obstructing respiratory
jets
There is a dose response relationship with virus particles and I'd prefer to acquire immunity from the minimum effective dose, a concept starting strength is very familiar with
. As some have said here, "let's rip the band aid off", well it'd be nice if the band-aid was small! A very strong innate immune response can lead to "bystander" damage to uninfected tissues.