Or, the economy is a very complicated system, and you can get emergent behavior that is counter-intuitive given the micro behaviour.
In particular, most recessions in the modern economy are caused by a demand disruption. It is not that we lost our ability to produce stuff, we had to stop producing stuff because we couldn't consume it faster. This (normally) isn't caused because people want to consume less, but rather because they had reduced ability to acquire goods (generally because they have less money than they previously did). That is to say, it is not a problem about our ability to produce goods, or even consume goods. It is a problem with our ability to allocate goods. At a high level, this really is a problem that you should be able to just through money at. Decide who you want the surplus goods to go to and throw money at them until consumption matches productive capacity. Of course, reality has a lot of pesky details to work out since, as I mentioned, the economy is incredibly complicated.
This is not to say that you can just inject unlimited money into the economy without causing any issues. But the effects of injecting money into the economy are dependent on how they are injected. Other ways of injecting money into the economy might increase productive capacity, which would have a deflationary effect that may act as a counter balance to the inflationary one. Other ones may quarantine the money in a part of the economy where they have minimal effect on the rest of the economy. For instance, if the treasury department sells bonds on the open market, the federal reserves prints money to buy those bonds, then the treasury department uses that money to pay interest on bonds held by the federal reserve; did anything really happen?
Ultimatly, economics is too complicated to try and solve from first principles. You need your thinking to be backed by empirical evidence. Prior to Covid, the Fed was trying to cause inflation by dumping money into the economy, but discovered that the economy simply doesn't work that way.
Edit: It is also worth noting that Covid caused an economic shock that is significantly different from the typical shocks we have experience with. If your approach to economics is rooted on empirical evidence, then you would expect to perform worse in such a situation, because you simply do not have as relevent of data to inform you decision making.
It is also worth noting that, unlike most economic crises, Covid was not primarily a breakdown in our ability to allocate goods. It looked like it was going to be, but that Governments did what this post suggests and injected money directly to people who lost their fiscal ability to consume.