You are assuming that there was any good way of dealing with a year where nobody went to work because of a global pandemic.

The economic pain of inflation was far preferable to the economic pain of active economic destruction, as short-term disruption to business would have resulted in long-term destruction of real value. It was far less painful long-term to print money and have the economy on pause for a year, with bills still getting paid, than it would have been to have the economy collapse over that year.

If it weren't for those mitigations, we'd all still be sitting around a tire fire, trading bottle caps for ammunition.