Short term thinking dominates economics these days. Managing the current downturn is most important, when people ask about longterm implications do a bunch of hand wavy stuff about it being temporary and then kick the can to the next guys who do the same thing.
You are assuming that there was any good way of dealing with a year where nobody went to work because of a global pandemic.
The economic pain of inflation was far preferable to the economic pain of active economic destruction, as short-term disruption to business would have resulted in long-term destruction of real value. It was far less painful long-term to print money and have the economy on pause for a year, with bills still getting paid, than it would have been to have the economy collapse over that year.
If it weren't for those mitigations, we'd all still be sitting around a tire fire, trading bottle caps for ammunition.
