To be fair, fiat was the best system they had back then to expand the global economy via a global reserve currency.

Without advanced computer systems, they could only expand the money supply by creating more fiat and "decrease" the supply, to combat inflation, by slowing the creation.

With a system like bitcoin, that has a fixed supply and is consistently divisible, to 8 decimals, you are able to provide a money to an increasing amount of people, without actually "increasing" the supply. But you need advanced computer systems.

The USD, needing real world physical representation, could only ever be divided to 2 decimals, and therefore increasing it's overall supply, not dividing a fixed supply, was the only solution.

Was greed and control also a factor? Probably. But it was also a technology problem. Thankfully satoshi solved it for us all now.