

I’m not saying “inflation means prices go up” I’m saying “inflation means prices went up”. There can be many things that cause prices to go up, inflation is one result of any such cause and of course then causes many things itself including further inflation.
In your scenario that’s inflation caused by price fixing. You seem to be saying these things are mutually exclusive but I don’t understand why you would say that.
The way it works for power over Ethernet — and I assume USB power delivery must work the same way — is that it does not reduce bandwidth because they run the power and the signal over the same wires at the same time.
There is a a power injector at one end and a filter at the other end that separate out the high-frequency signal and the DC (no-frequency) power into different wires.
This is essentially the same thing as they’re already doing for multi-frequency stacking on those same wires (and on fiber) to get the crazy bandwidth in the first place. DC power is just one more low (very very low) frequency running on the same stack.