It is not so simple as to say salaries went up so inflation went up. Inflation from decreased supply at the same time as increased Treasury spending through stimuluses, coupled with the workforce shrinking, is what caused salaries to rise.

Once more, I'm not making an argument about causality. I'm saying that the "compensation" of salaries for inflation already happened.

Arguments about "why" just aren't helpful here. Everyone thinks they're smarter than everyone else and knows policies that will be perfect, and everyone is wrong for the same reasons. It's a cyclic feedback market and it just does this stuff, for the most part.

But you absolutely can't look at things with a microscope and say "salaries don't keep up with inflation", because that's (almost by definition) never true.

It's not a feedback cycle. Inflation is the increase in money existing. Paying higher salaries do not increase the amount of money existing, as that money is taken from somewhere. Raising prices do not increase the amount of money existing. Only the money creators can increase the amount of money existing. Money is created by banks and governments in symbiosis.

Increased prices of labour or products is always a consequence of inflation and never the cause of inflation.

This is conflating "money", which you seem to take colloquially to be a finite quantity of "stuff", with "money supply". Inflation is the result of an increase in the latter, but emphatically not the former. In fact money supply grows and shrinks for all sorts of reasons that have nothing to do with things being created or destroyed.

And to my point upthread: the factors that result in changes in the money supply are themselves subject to influence by lots of things, including stuff like the rate of inflation. It is absolutely, 100%, a feedback network.