Fun fact: Cypherpunks understood hard money, but their attempts at e-cash were based on usd or gold. They knew kickstarting new money is insanely difficult.

P2P ecash was not about inflation and central banks (well, there was gold), but about privacy and censorship resistance. That were the properties that made cryptoanarchy work.

Relying on meatspace assets makes it incredibly hard to be not shut down, but starting network effects on new assets is equally hard. In this sense, bitcoin was not inevitable, it was a miracle that it worked so well.