So the reason Americans were going to suffer is because democrats had the gumption to oppose a clean CR. The answer was to admit their mistake like the good surrender monkeys they are.

No need to be disparaging about it. Americans were going to suffer because the Democrats have no leverage other than to refuse to vote to fund the government, and any effort to utilize that leverage would - inescapably - cause Americans to suffer. It's not a "mistake" to exercise that leverage even though Americans will suffer, but it does require some assessment of whether the likelihood of achieving the Democrats' objectives warrants the suffering that is being experienced.

The Democrats were trying to get the GOP to change their position on the ACA subsidies. It didn't work. The Democrats also wanted to raise awareness of the impending ACA premium catastrophe....and that did work. After more than a month, the latter goal was mostly accomplished, but the former goal was revealed to be impossible - public opinion didn't put enough of the blame on the GOP, so they were never going to face enough pressure to actually relent.

The courts and the Nov 21 deadline were going to force the republicans to act or to own their politics of starvation completely, there was no reason for the dinocrats to take ownership of that politics.

Except there's no reason to think that the Republicans were going to have to own their politics of starvation. Again, the public was generally split on whether to blame Democrats or Republicans. The GOP was not facing any particular political incentive to change their position. Democrats were hoping that the GOP would be blamed more than the Democrats for the resulting consequences of the showdown, but that was not showing up in the polling.

The Democrats could not have continued to vote against the CR indefinitely. Their constituents were also putting pressure on them to have the shutdown end. Access to food was starting to get cut off, flights were getting cancelled - this was going to end soon, and it was not going to end with the GOP agreeing to anything more than what the Democrats got.

Would it have been worth it to have people actually start dying from lack of food and then have to vote for the same CR....just to have kept "fighting" for another week or two?