It's funny to me that deflation being bad is an orthodoxy despite the paucity of evidence for this. Can you point to a deflationary episode that was harmful? Japan had the "lost decade" of slow growth, but is slow growth bad? Is the absence of conspicuous consumption lamentable? In comparison, people starve and flee, and societies collapse under episodes of hyperinflation.
The classic example of functional deflation is in technology: computers have been under substantial deflationary pressure from the increase in performance year over year, yet people still have bought computers, and the industry has still prospered despite this.
Likewise, civilization was largely built on hard money economies, and prospered, despite the difficulty of debasing within them. It has largely fallen under soft money conditions, as in the the Weimar Republic, or the debasement of the late Roman Empire.
Note that this "deflation is bad" orthodoxy is propagated by the same economic regime that embraces inflation as beneficial, and profits from the printing of money.