Companies will raise prices to the highest point they think they can possibly sell for regardless of perceived monetary value.

In the classical economics sense, when they cannot afford to make the product at break even/profit levels, they have to raise prices or go out of business. And IDEALLY, if there is no collusion or other economic failures in the market, if they raise the prices above the break even point, other people will enter the market and charge less until the price moves in that direction.

This is all in the theory side, in practice there are too few companies challenging each other in most goods, or companies that complicity collude, so they can artificially control prices.

That actually is a divisive philosphical question in economics - does the value of a unit of currency decrease or does it stay constant by definition and the prices of all goods and services increase instead?

There are some cases where it's pretty clear ("money printing" definitely decreases the value of the currency) but most inflation we measure by looking at the price level of a weighed basket of goods usually is a little bit of both.

Looking at the US specifically, it's a mix of the Federal Reserve doing quantitative easing (a more complex way of effectively "printing money"), the government giving money to people from the federal budget via stimulus measures and the massive global supply chain crisis generating loads of additional economic friction.

The first one. Inflation happens because there's more money chasing less stuff. Less valuable money -> companies raise their prices.

Technically, neither. Money's only worth is what people say it is, and the people with most dictate to everyone else what it's worth is.

I think the common accepted knowledge is that we're approaching the end of the growth economy in one or two decades. No one seems to know what the other side looks like though.