When you look at CA/FL, remember to look at socal and norcal separately.
Most of the deaths in CA were in LA, OC, Riv, and San Bernadino. For those four counties, you have 38,800 deaths out of 18 million residents. 2150 deaths per million. That is worse than Florida, and close to South Dakota.
For the entire rest of the state, you have 24,500 deaths out of a population of 22 million. 1,100 deaths per million. Considerably better than Florida, and similar to Colorado.
The question then becomes not “why did CA policies fail?”, but “what went wrong in socal?”.