The IMF has always understood the Pakistani economy and the reasons for its downfall far better than anyone inside Pakistan, especially its government and foreign ministers ever have, simply because the IMF, for all its flaws or not, is actually a finance related company with actual experts.
Pakistanis just love to hate the IMF because it makes realistic demands, the demands IMF makes to any other country would make total sense, but our systems are so corrupt, our people so blind and patriotism so high that we absolutely refuse to believe that we have to change to improve, instead we just toss IMF into the usual “the world is against us and this institution is controlled by the west” bucket and call it a day instead of realizing that if all of IMFs directives were to be followed, Pakistan would most likely be out of the gutter right now. Yes the people would have suffered massively in the short run, but when you sink your country so low, that’s the only way to fix it.
A good government would have balanced IMF demands while also making sure the people weren’t getting too pressured, though a more IMF-centric approach would still be the solution at the end of the day. But yet again, our politicians messed up, both the PTI, who simply refused to listen to any of IMFs demands in order to keep the public happy, and the PDM, who did the same at first but took it so far that the country hit crisis levels and jumped headfirst into the IMF to try and fix things, not realizing how badly the people would be effected. And yet the followers of both sides will keep trying to blindly defend their parties.