In your example, there's two things you could do depending on your usecase: 1) You think inflation will go up and capitalize on it. Today, you might think that a good way to do that is to short SPY. That's good, not great - because it's a proxy: inflation could still go up, and you SPY could go up as well (correlation is not 1:1 for a number of reasons).
The best way to express that view is by buying inflation event contracts: more direct, no basis risk, cleaner.
This use-case was super common when I was at Goldman and Citadel, which is where we got the idea.
2) You hold SPY but worry about the exposure of your holdings to inflation: you can use event contracts to hedge that exposure very precisely... think of it as a precise, meticulous surgery on your portfolio to eliminate (or even take) risks that are very difficult to eliminate with traditional instruments.