I don't think it's correct to say "rates were kept low" as if the Fed had a choice in the matter. All the Fed can really do is respond to market conditions. It can be slow to react, and it could in theory be wrong about the market in a way that causes economic damage (in one direction or the other), but it can't really do better than the implied market rate.

Interest rates were kept at historic lows for a decade because the 2008 crisis caused available credit to absolutely implode, which destroyed a huge swath of the effective money supply. Leverage ratios at banks went from north of 40:1 to closer to 10:1. Without ZIRP and QE and all of the rest, we would have had outright deflation, kicking off the kind of deflationary debt spiral that made the Great Depression so bad.

That kind of dramatic destruction of credit did not happen during the pandemic. The banks were fine [0]. What happened was that the economic output of actual goods and services collapsed. So high levels of stimulus led to more money chasing fewer real resources, and you got inflation instead.

This should not have been a surprise.

[0] Modulo a few like SVB that blew up a couple of years later because they had forgotten that interest rates could also go up.