One way to look at this: until the past couple of weeks, sit-down restaurants in TX/GA/FL were operating at maybe 10-20% capacity and returning only 10-20% back to normal (with people being careful, using socially distanced seating, etc.) was never likely to cause a huge spike.
Now that restaurants in these places are operating at ~50% capacity (not that restaurants themselves are so important, but using them as a proxy for broader activity) we'll see what the numbers look like in a couple of weeks.
Which is not to say you can't find fault with the critics. Trying to convince people that "reopening will cause huge spikes", when in practice re-opening was extremely modest and tentative, was a dumb and foreseeable mistake and set a low bar for success for these states.
