The emergency measures are needed because the peacetime policy was not designed to be resilient. A better peacetime policy would have obviated the need for destructive emergency measures.
The peacetime policy was to build renewable capacity. Now there is radically more renewable capacity than before, much more than if another direction had been chosen.
If 30% coal today is bad, >>30% coal, the alternative, would have been correspondingly worse.
Yeah the plan was to buy methane gas from Russia instead. Still a non renewable source, but the gas would have caused less CO2 emissions and less pollution (gas causes less CO2 per kilowatt hour). Of course, the war and the bombings of NordStream have put an end to that.
The gas would have been used to fill in while renewables were being built out. Now coal is filling in while renewables are being built out even faster.
Without the investment to date in wind, coal dependency would have been massively greater.
Yeah, note that a lot of those renewables won't be built in Germany but outside of it, as there is simply no capacity for this in Germany.
While Germany is a net exporter for electricity, it does import a large chunk of its total energy usage (electricity plus stuff like fuel for cars, heating, et). Stuff like coal or gas or oil. In 2017, it was from 70% of imports and 30% from energy harvested locally [0]. It's quite impossible that this can all be converted to renewable power sources originating in Germany.
So what will likely/hopefully happen is that the closer partner countries will supply electricity to Germany via cables, while countries from further away will send Hydrogen generated from renewable sources, that will then be burned in the already existing gas plants.
