You have to beat inflation. It's not long or short term profitability, it's taking an asset and making it return more than inflation. Treasury bonds or stocks or mobile home parks or monkey nfts, it's all the same thing.
If you study the history of what investing in a company via shares has historically meant, you'll find that it's only really in the last half century that the "appreciation game" came to the forefront. Dividends yields (or equivalent) were the evaluation criteria for these investments prior to our current era.
You speak about inflation and stock as if the cause/effect relationship is crystal clear and unidirectional, I wouldn't be so confident about that.
I don't think "you don't want to beat inflation?!?!?!" is a good faith interpretation of what I'm talking about higher up in the thread - which is rampant speculation for the publicly traded companies, and behavior tantamount to rug pulls in the case of private equity.