I think it's fair to call my comment unhelpful because my point wasn't to suggest that the article's contents were unsurprising, but rather to criticize the HN

I think it's fair to call my comment unhelpful because my point wasn't to suggest that the article's contents were unsurprising, but rather to criticize the HN title and provoke further reflection on causation. The article doesn't explicitly suggest that profits are the largest driver (which I interpret as cause) of inflation, but it does use the word drivers for categories in a graph, which I think is unfortunate wording. The data are consistent with corporate profits being the largest category of the bunch where inflation is realized rather than necessarily suggesting that it's the largest cause of inflation. An explanation citing corporate profits as the root cause of inflation would lose the ability to predict when inflation is most likely to occur (e.g. after periods of loose monetary policy combined with large fiscal stimulus)