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Inflation is only strongly redistributive if it either happens alongside or immediately after a large scale collapse in asset values. In this case the opposite happened, anyone who was rich in 2009 is much, much richer now. Anyone who was poor in 2009 is probably doing a little better, but still hasn’t had close to an opportunity to catch up. $1m in the S&P 500 in 2010 is $6m today. There’s a reason the only major new money in the ZIRP era was generated in private equity and tech.
Inflation is only not distributive if it's spread equally among money-holders. IIRC it's how economists believe it should be done, and how they assume it is being done to make the models simpler (see "helicopter money"), but it's actually never done that way.
Inflation is classically redistributive because it erodes asset prices, increases borrowing costs and raises incomes. Older, wealthier people lose relative financial standing, while younger, asset-poor ‘not rich yet’ yuppies with high earning jobs experience a relative (and often substantial) boost in financial standing. That generational redistribution hasn’t happened at all over this period of inflation because asset prices have remained sky high throughout, and are still rising. No wealthy boomer need sell his home because his cost of living has gone up, because his investment portfolio has doubled since COVID, more than making up for the impact of inflation on his expenditure.
Inflation doesn't erode asset prices (going into assets is actually the way you're supposed to respond to inflation), it erodes cash balances.
Of course, the point is that historically periods of financial upheaval (and falling inequality, or larger financial redistribution) have very little to do with inflation at all, and are instead usually more to do with wars, famine or plague.
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Inflation is classically redistributive because if you create $1000 and give it to someone, he'll be able to buy $1000 worth of stuff before the prices adjust to the new money supply. Even if the adjustment was instantaneous, the distribution of money would be skewed of in favor of the guy who got the money. The only way this doesn't happen is if you increase the supply of money without affecting it's distribution, i.e. "helicopter money".
The effects you describe are among the last to come about as result of inflation, and the redistribution doesn't even have to go the way you described. It can just as easily go the opposite way: fresh money being sunk into the stonk and real-estate markets, favoring the boomers at the expense of the young.
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