In the past inflation was seen as a bad thing and destabilizing to an economy so governments put actual effort into making it go down. The easiest way to do that is to keep employee wages in line with inflation, but at some point someone, probably with an R next to their name, decided that that was evil socialism, and so shouldn't be done.

So now inflation goes up and the government just sits there and goes "oh nothing we can do".

In the past, governments didn't have inflation targets. The black friday event involved the government flooding the gold market, dramatically reducing the value of gold. At the time the value of a dollar was directly tied to the value of gold. In hyper-inflation events (that don't often happen in developed countries but do still happen in some countries around the world), inflation may be 50% or 100% or 200%. Sometimes way more.

These days (the last 30 or 40 years), inflation and gold have been decoupled, and instead the government has a target range of approx 1-3% inflation (depending on your exact government, but if you're in a developed country then it is probably close). This was intended as a target that would allow businesses to have some certainty and was low so they could ignore inflation in their forecasts. The original target range was 0-2% set in New Zealand, but as it spread around the world it got slightly adjusted to a 1-3% range.

The governments now try to directly control inflation by changing the cost of borrowing money. You might have recently had inflation hit as much as 9%, but this is nothing like what happened in the old days.