I think this is a glamorization of the past. I'll bet most exchange throughout history was being done with some level of fraud baked into the system highly up the chain. Our modern fiscal institutions haven't even been cooking for 100 years and look at all the shit the weird sages in the crown city keep pulling with our green coinage.
"it's a feature not a bug."
That doesn't sound correct. There isn't a limited supply, but introducing more currency into circulation can reduce the value of it, which is a proper use of debasing.
As a contrived example, if the treasury printed 100 trillion dollars and handed it out to everyone, I'm doubtful that bread would still be $1 a loaf.
That's different than (e.g.) Roman-era debasement where they were using less valuable metals to mint coins and the value of the coin was based on the perceived metal content of the coin, rather than being fiat currency that follows supply and demand trends.
If the currency was debased, inflation would have occurred fairly evenly across the economy, since the currency would be literally worth less. Instead we saw inflated prices chase sectors of the economy where there was either an over supply of money (e.g. PE buying up housing, driving up the price) or an undersupply of product (e.g. cheap eggs).
Nothing makes this necessarily true. As an example, if the government printed everyone in the world 100 trillion dollars, and everyone used it to buy as much house they could, and nothing else, then houses would skyrocket in price as this money spurred demand for houses causing a shortage of housing stock (as prices are a matter of supply vs demand). Bread wouldn't change a dime in this scenario, because no one used the new money to buy more bread than normal, causing a supply shortage of bread. Ergo, nothing necessitates that inflation occurs evenly across the economy. Not even in Roman times. Inflation only occurs where demand happens. If demand, demands it be stored in bank accounts, then bank accounts inflate.
We saw some inflation on food and gas prices in 2022 (for reason not directly related to monetary policy), but not in 2020 or 2021 when the cash was added to the economy - we saw inflation in assets because the Fed handed out cash to investors who deployed it on a limited pool of assets.