No, CPI does not gloss over improvements in quality. CPI gets diligent hedonic adjustments. Good news is always welcome, it seems. By contrast, BLS usually doesn't even try to track enshittification. This compounds, and that's another reason why CPI is a poor measure. Not to mention the recent statistical fuckery with trimmed means or the less recent fuckery around excluding energy costs during bouts of energy inflation. How much proof do you need that CPI is a political quantity not a measure of the economy?

Hypothetical YIMBY parallel universes have no place in an inflation discussion. If NIMBYs inflated the price of houses and you want a house, it's inflation that is relevant to you, end of story. As for the volatility of gold, yeah, that disqualifies gold from being a good measure on short timescales. Fortunately, we have a good short-timescale inflation measure: CPI. But gold compounds correctly whereas CPI does not. In the short run, volatility is everything, in the long run, compounding is everything. Don't use gold to figure out how much inflation happened last year and don't use CPI to figure out how much inflation happened last decade.

Reminder: I presented gold and housing as dirty hacks. The correct methodology is to construct a basket of things you care about and track them. If the dirty hacks have dirty hack problems, well, such is the nature of dirty hacks.

Then what number would you use instead? A "correct methodology" that's not done is useless.

Complaining about CPI to defend using nominal values poorly is not improving the article's analysis.