Is job title inflation a real thing or am I just being cynical

So I've been a dev for about 6 years now. Started as a junior, got bumped to senior after 2.5 years which felt pretty reasonable. Then last year my company did one of those big reorgs and overnight I became a "Staff Engineer." Cool I guess? But literally nothing changed about what I do day to day. Same team, same work. The thing that's been bugging me is looking at what people call themselves at other companies. A guy I went through bootcamp with is now a "Principal Architect" at a startup with maybe 15 people. I know someone who got hired as VP of Engineering and he manages like 2 people. And LinkedIn is full of people with "Head of" or "Director of" titles who've been working for 3 years total. I'm not trying to gatekeep or anything. But it kinda feels like titles are just becoming meaningless. Like companies realized it's way cheaper to promote someone's title than to actually give them more money. Is this a tech thing specifically or does this happen in other industries too? Because when I talk to my friends outside tech they still seem to have pretty normal title progressions