No one said, at any point, that we are on a level where no hishtadlus is necessary, or that there is no need for hakaras hatov towards the actual soldiers. (Hint – the ones making the most noise against the Chareidim are not the soldiers…)
The core issue here is that “hishtadlus” does not permit ????? ????? and going OTD. This has much less to do with learning Torah, than it has to do with keeping Torah. In the Litvish language “learning Torah” is a code word for all of Yiddishkeit. ????? ??????, the Chassidish and Sephardim are speaking Lithuanian.
On the Chiloni side, the ones pushing this issue do not have the interests of the IDF at heart. They are out to “bring the Chareidim into the Israeli mainstream”, which is dog whistle language for OTD.
What we have here are two sides who know full well what they want and why, and what the other side wants and why, but they can’t say what they really mean, (from the Chareidi perspective for the very reason you started off with…) so they use code language.
I don’t know what the Gedolim hold the point of the “march” is, but my best guess is they are trying to show that this issue is dear to too big a segment of the population for the AG/SC dictatorship to disenfranchise. In this context “Atzeres Tefilah” is code language for “no violence”.
By the way, if it is so much easier to be a Chareidi than to be a soldier, and the whole Chareidi thing is just about taking the easy way out and “not wanting to sacrifice”, so why don’t the Chilonim who don’t like the army go become Chareidim? Who is stopping them? ?????, let all the Chilonim (and especially all the girls) leave the IDF to go to Yeshiva (and Beis Yaakov or Neve Yerushalayim or something) and learn how to live as Jews, and then ONLY Chareidim (who never interrupted between Tefillin Shel Yad and Shel Rosh…) will serve in a real Halachic army…
The reality is that no other segment of Israeli society sacrifices more for what they believe in than the Chareidim do. Even among those who serve in the IDF, most are not active combat soldiers. Which also means that once they finish their three year stint, they do little if any Miluim. Being a real Chareidi is a life commitment, that encompasses every aspect of one’s life, for the entire duration of one’s life.