I only mentioned laddering to ease any fears of "locking everything up all at once" the OP may have had -- I hadn't considered interest rates.

For I-Bonds the rates are now worth it. They are very CD-like, in that you can't withdraw them for the first year, and in the first 5 there is a few month interest penalty for early withdrawal.

You can only buy $10k per person per year, but as a married couple, you could build up 100K in savings over 5 years, and even faster if you hold them in a trust.

Can you explain why it would be faster to hold I-bonds in a trust?

From the internet:

One limitation of buying I Bonds is the annual purchase limit. Each person can buy a maximum of $10,000 per calendar year as the primary owner.

In addition, if you have a trust, you can buy another $10,000 per year under the name of the trust. A lawyer created a revocable living trust for us back in 2018. It was surprisingly easy when I opened an account for the trust at TreasuryDirect last month. It took only 15 minutes to open a new trust account and buy another $10,000 of I Bonds.

So it lets you double the amount you can buy.

Was offered 1% for 11 month deposit yesterday. Much better than last year's 0.25%, but still, what, 1/8 of US inflation?!

Even less worth it when Alliant is paying 1% for a bog-standard saving account: https://www.alliantcreditunion.org/bank/high-yield-savings

That's relatively good. My credit union is still offering only 0.2% on >$100K.

The main benefit of cash recently is losing less value each day than stocks!

https://kpcu.com/Rates

No. But if you're going to hoard cash, laddering is a slightly better way to do so.

That's for you to assess based on your risk profile. My answer is at the moment it's not worth it