I appreciate the thoughtful answers <3
A permanent deflationary environment makes the bar to investment as high as possible. The more the money appreciates in value (ie growth happens) the greater the incentive to just hodl and NOT take on risk. Therefore throttling growth. So growth stagnates to the extent it happens.
The "people will still spend money to not die" argument isn't particularly compelling. It sounds like being thrown back to the stone age tbh.
We already see this with Bitcoiners now. They're cheap and don't want to spend Bitcoin. Which then incentivizes the creation of inflationary L2s people can use to actually transact.
It's a design riddled with game-theory complications and flaws.