Damoshe, rav mintz was doing just that – he was blasting the state and zionism as an ideology as inherently bad. He didn’t say that once there’s a state we should be quiet about its past to not make us look bad – he said the opposite himself.
No one changed a stance; they were against making it, but they weren’t against working with it should it be made – if that were the case, you could say that the attitude changed. It didn’t; only the metzius changed; now there’s a state – what do we do about it? We work with it from the inside. But we maintain our Torah true ideology and eschew nationalism or the thought that the mamzer child of the marriage between European nationalism and jewish haskalah would ever have a redemptive quality.
Gedolim who endorsed working with the state to a very large extent, including rav shach, who even took the heter further than the chazon ish, saying that things were different then(especially under Begin) – yet he blasted zionism all the time.