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This aligns with my thoughts in a general sense, with different caveats and less finality. Information sphere wise, easy Iranian victory. Underlying structural power factors, though... the war doesn't have to be a US 'win' to have bad effects on Iran.
My biggest caveat is that I personally don't think regime change or even a uprising was actually an early war goal of the Americans or Israelis. I think it was a sort of hoped-for outcome that served as a public justification that they wanted to encourage, and would absolutely have taken credit for if there was any sort of anti-regime movement, but I suspect it mostly was about putting people (particularly the Iranians) in a state of mind to, well, believe that regime change was actually the intention of what was basically a month-long (air) raid.
Which is a forest I think a lot (most) of the wartime discussion missed for the trees of individual leadership strikes. Almost everyone in the region had a general sense of what the US and Israelis had in theater, which was a lot of airpower and precious few maneuver formations. And yet, discussion for so long went from Kurdish invasions to Kharg island to what have you. Some people may believe the Iranians deterred and forced each invasion attempt to fail... or, possibly, there wasn't an invasion attempt at all. At which point it's not quite axiomatic to claim victory in repelling the invaders, but that's mostly because sometimes raiders won't leave on their own accord.
As far as a type of military operation go, though, raids are used to kill people or destroy things, and possibly bring something back. It doesn't seem like there was any raid of the nuclear sites to bring back uranium, but there was absolutely a lot of IRGC (and not-so-IRGC) military-industrial-economic infrastructure hit. Just how much and how severely remains to be see, but the growth curve has definitely been set back a bit, so to speak. Almost as impactfully, the most significant people killed were generally a leadership generation that had a lifetime of lived experience that waging proxy war could stay below the level of major combat operations, or at least stay largely safe themselves (at least until about a year or two prior). Their successors (probably) won't have that same mindset, even as they will have the reduced MIE-base to work with.
I think one of the more interesting potential long-term changes / harms to Iran will be what the impacts of the leadership succession will be. The previous Ayatollah had a lot of regional legitimacy with Shia because he was a cleric first, a ruler second. In so much that the IRGC took the reigns to run the country during the conflict and has become even stronger within Iran, the war has converted Iran from a theocracy with a praetorian guards to a praetorian guard with a theocracy. There are a number of longer-term implications of that, from religious legitimacy to rationalization of the security state and the increasing resilience of a state-within-the-state that is less bound to the clerics. It may take years to decades, but I suspect the revolutionary Islam cred will degrade compared to what it would have been, particularly if the IRGC-dominated Iran gets equated to with corruption and desires for wealth... which the current list of demands centering around money aren't exactly working against.
The war opening with the killings of a huge amount of their top leadership. I think it’s tough to believe that regime change wasn’t a major goal of this operation.
In my view, this is conflating regime leadership with regime type, which is what I'd consider 'regime change' to generally refer to.
This is understandable in more personalist systems, such as dictatorships built around specific individuals with minimal backbench of successors. In these cases, so much of the regime is tied to the individual that removing the individual removes a key driver of many of the distinct policies of the regime. An example here is Russia, where while whoever follows Putin is likely to be someone at least tolerable to Putin's security state, there's no institutional driver compelling them to follow Putin's desire to be a Great Man of History.
Iran has many issues, but that is not / was not one of them. Iran had a large backbench of clerics with government or military experience, just as it hard large cadres of Revolutionary old guard who could fill in if the old guard died suddenly or gradually. In turn, the system has spent a lot more time and effort trying to ensure that potential successors will be of a type. The clerical government's vetting and veto process is what has made even 'moderate' and often sidelied official opposition amount to 'I agree with your goals but think this is a bad way to pursue it,' while the IRGC is its own self-selecting force with get-along-to-get-along patronage networks.
With the IRGC's own influence now (and predictably) shaping the supreme leader succession, that is and was predictable grounds for expecting a change of leadership leading to a change of personalities, not a change in regime type.
I think the strategy with taking out top leadership was entirely a strategy of changing the type of regime. Likely not literal the name of the regime but that the guy who ends up staying into the throne fears enough for his life to be friendly with the Americans. Like Venezuela. Same regime in name but essentially a US vassal on key things.
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