It can be all of those things! The pandemic introduced a lot of wildcards into the economy and exacerbated already existant trends. Even financial experts say there’s really no way to tell how much each factor contributed to the situation. I agree that supply chain issues is an obvious factor, but because interest rates were so low, people didn’t think twice about paying more than they normally would because debt was so much cheaper. We saw this when it came to electronics and home improvement items when people were trapped at home and wanting to go into new hobbies, or get projects done (crypto boom also hurt the GPU situation even more, but suckers continued to pay 2-4k for scalped NVIDIAs anyway).

The fed has gone on record saying they’re using unemployment as a metric for when they’ll start letting up on the rates, so another checkmark for you on “punishing workers”, but they’re also tying worker’s purchasing power as a direct contibuter to inflation outside of interest rates, which is a debatable opinion depending on what study you look at and I personally disagree with, but that does make it harder to deliniate if it’s actively malicious on their part or just passively malicious.