This is a rather tendentious article. Just two examples:
(1) “A widespread disaffection with government is evident in the peaceful protests in major cities practically every weekend (sometimes for things as trivial as wearing face masks).”
Perhaps this is trivial to the author but clearly not everyone agrees.
(2) “Another element that might sit behind recent discontent is something that the Netherlands is often praised for: a light-touch legal system and emphasis on alternatives to prison and processes like mediation. Although Grapperhaus has pledged to fast-track stiff justice for rioters, and police are busy scanning camera images to round up the Rotterdam culprits, the Netherlands has recently been seen by organised crime as a “low-threshold” entry point to Europe.”
It seems fairly foreseeable that demanding different rules for your political enemies would trigger a degree of outrage.

Another article underscoring the official message of unending compliance. Wear your face masks. Get your jabs. Amazing these folk consider themselves insightful.

But while 15,000 people have received €30,000 in compensation so far, the apparent racism engrained in government institutions has not yet been fully investigated

I am sure the Dutch government is not staffed by diehard Neo-Nazis. Please can journalists find another way to express this problem instead of presenting it as a deliberate act of official policy to penalise non-white people? You are making it sound like intentional bigotry when it is almost certainly a clumsy and accidental policy failure. Not only is it wildly misleading but it also plays into the hands of the same leftwing fanatics who invented this “institutional racism” terminology.

Governments throughout Europe have continually lied to their electorates, gradually imposing ever more stringent rules based on little more than pseudoscience and brazenly and publicly failed to follow their own rules. They have pushed and pushed on the boundaries of their own constitutions and gone way beyond what any decent and law abiding person would have thought possible just 18 short months ago. The law enforcement and judicial functions of society have been utilised to control any dissent eagerly encouraged by an intolerant and self-interested growing middle class fuelled by social and mainstream media.
It’s a real shame that even Unherd are giving a platform to such over-educated, self-unaware people as this author who fails to identify a single contributory factor to the rising civil unrest. As these people become even more ignorant of what’s happening in the lives of the millions of everyday people whose contributions actually run these countries and actually generate the tax that pays for them to sit at home passing judgement the resentment will get deeper and the unrest will get stronger.
Vive la révolution.

I don’t think mandating mask-wearing is trivial.

Totally with Andrea Re below this article is drek and at the same lower six form level as the fake ethics and philosophy programmes you hear on Radio 4. Fine for 17 year olds but not for national “thinking” media. Enough already. Author not thoughtful enough to know they’re not thoughtful enough!

TO TRUST OR NOT TO TRUST
We cannot fully pit freedom against Covid-measures. BASICALLY, but not under all circumstances, an infectious disease is a collective matter.
We shall then have to look at the character of the disease in order to judge if the measures are reasonable or not. The burden of evidence should then be on those who support the measures. But even if I belong to the other side, I shall give one argument on the matter (against).
In Germany (where I live) there are some 15 000 “cases” (reported infections) per week. Is that a high number? In the same country there are some 20 000 deaths per week (not from Covid). I guess you will expect your collegue (or your neighbour next door) to be there also next week. You do not even think that he might die in the meantime. The “risk” that he will turn out to be a “case” next week, is then even smaller.
The Covid-crises has turned into a crisis of trust. Since we cannot all monitor the statistics and scrutinize all the scientific evidence all the time, we shall have to trust the government, the journalists or our own experience + common sense.
I think the latter is the last you should give up on. However, the majority of the population seems to have done exactly that. A loss in individual self-confidence may turn out to be the biggest loss suffered from the crises. 

I shall continue to erect chain link fencing around my windows to keep out the mozzis. Meanwhile, “An espresso? Papers please!”

Do you know, sometimes I think that the real danger is that more and more common folk are are becoming just plain f-ing bored with it all. I have read that, it is possible that the roots of boredom lie in a fundamental breakdown in our understanding of what it is we want to do !
Boredom often goes with impulsive mindsets among those who are constantly looking for new experiences. For some, the hum drum beat of life just isn’t sexy enough of a bungee jump to hold their attention their world is under stimulating… and Covid restrictions just exasperate that so its a case of, god knows what they will do next !!.
Then there is the second kind of bored person who has the opposite problem; their world has a always been a fearful old place, and so victim to the constant media mantra about the grim reaper of Covid and the rules spewed by dimwitted leaders they shut themselves away and try not to step outside their comfort zone . Being highly sensitive they withdraw physically and in terms of applying commonsense to what they see, hear, are commanded. But for many of these folk the initial retreat is insufficient, it doesn`t provide them the cuddly blanket they want and as the boredom deepens they retreat further, give up their rights, comply, wither….
Because boredom may trigger frustration or potentially depressed feelings it has potential hugely negative implications when millions upon million are/maybe affected. 

Somehow the use of the word “bitter” placed in front of irony, as used by the virologist to describe the burning police car outside the Erasmushuis, is indicative of the myriad ways that people take to mush up right and wrong.
A bitter irony would be a dispute among the housekeepers of the Erasmushuis leading to the torching of each other’s cars parked outside.
Or the city centre destroyed by complete anarchy on the anniversary of the Luftwaffe’s destruction of Rotterdam’s city centre.
We’ve gone in a day from Rittenhouse to Rotterhouse to … what next? Rotted house?
The people rioted. They shouldn’t have. It’s wrong. They don’t live in the Third World. Little old ladies did not riot. And God love ‘em. Some of them remember the starvation Holland suffered even in the three or four years following WW2.

“Young men with nothing to do.”

Is this the perception most Dutch citizens have of much of their population of young men? Is this the new way of describing the unemployed young?
Or are they students who study from home?
“Young men with nothing to do” sounds like life revolving around soup kitchens and hiring spots for young and restless or forlorn figures in The Grapes Of Wrath.

As for those other “disparate groups” apparently involved in the disturbances, the football hooligans and harbour (port) workers, what do THEY do of an evening? Or during the day? In the 24-hour economy?

Has the pandemic not led to a lot of different people having nothing to do? Big, industrial Dutch towns are not the bright lights of New York or London, I imagine. But a hundred years ago, young men in New York probably had nothing to do and, yet, everything to do.
Is it just too easy to sneer at Dutch society as a whole when it is very noticeable that there are a whole lot of young men doing nothing? Is it the Dutch government’s fault? The fault of faulty Dutch ways?

What a thoroughly jumbled piece of writing: social justice hand wringing, a whiff of Erasmus, mulling about “the alienated”, a fireworks ban, “trivial” mask-wearing and of course some obligatory comments about “far-Right” parties and “apparent racism”. 
To give the author some credit though, at the end she does throw in a meek “violence in Rotterdam cannot, therefore, be dismissed as mere hooliganism“. Of course it can’t! But it will be. It’s the stock argument of the authorities here. It’s not that they don’t want to understand, they are incapable of understanding just how angry and fed-up ordinary people are. The governing class are so arrogant, so smug and so convinced of the rectitude of their views that they simply cannot countenance the idea that anyone who disagrees with them may have a point, or heaven forbid, that their own policies may be the cause of the turmoil in our society! So yes, officially the riots were caused by hooligans, clearly egged on by criminals and far-right elements. Conditions caused by nearly 2 years of Covid restrictions – and especially the new ones recently imposed – had absolutely nothing to do with the unrest. The sheer dishonesty of it all beggars the imagination. No wonder distrust of politicians is at an all-time high!
Meanwhile week by week the absurdities pile up. As many have pointed out, 20 months of compliance with every form of restriction have delivered ZERO! + record infection rates! Forget about the impact on the social fabric, a mentally retarded crow would be able to deduce that the current policies have not worked. For the authorities, the solution is to double down. Beyond lockdowns, “Vaccination” is the way out now. Smearing of the unvaccinated has overflowed into demonization. And it works. An avid Covid extremist (yes let’s call him that) told me the other day that anyone who doesn’t want to be vaccinated should be locked up! 
I have lived in Rotterdam for 25 years and when I came here I would never have thought that the gentle, decent, Dutch population would acquiesce to the kind of restrictions now being imposed. Fortunately not all of them do. And many people I know who have towed the line so far are now baulking at the idea of looming vaccine mandates, boosters (which will become compulsory eventually) and a future of unending lockdowns. The appearance of the nasty new “Austrian” variant of vaccine mandate adds to the uneasiness: actively ostracizing a large part of your population in the manner envisaged by some makes apartheid look tame. 
I would like to think that the penny is slowly dropping that we are all being led up the garden path by a bunch of, at best, well-intentioned incompetents. But it’s probably wishful thinking to think there will be enough opposition to have any effect in the near future. So for now, we continue to live with the government’s criminally stupid policy of lockdowns. Here’s hoping they pay a heavy price for it next election.

For things as trivial as compulsion by force to wear a Swastika armband because the moon is in alignment with Saturn.

There are no solutions. Only choices. When masks are mandated, that takes away choice and breeds resentment. Choose imperfect voluntary mask compliance over 100% “perfect” yet resentful compliance with mandates.

I feel the author has rather hyped up the turbulence and discontent in the Netherlands. Some people are discontented and there is a current fashion for showing discontent by protest, maybe because COVID (not necessarily covid restrictions) has created frustrations in society. It won’t last long or have a very big impact.