The reality of inflation in recent decades is that asset prices inflated while worker incomes did not, this created substantial inequality via e.g. housing prices and rents. Even worse is when food and energy prices also inflate (like recently), while worker incomes do not. A rich person spends sub 1% of wealth on food and energy, a very poor person, more like 50-80% (and the rest on the aforementioned shelter costs).

These real world examples illustrate what I think is the key point: it's not about inflation or deflation as a global measure, it's more about how the price changes are distributed over different things.

If wages kept up with asset inflation over the last 50 years, you wouldn't have seen a drastic increase in inequality.