This is a bit how I try to view Monero personally.
People say they bought Monero with dollars, and I get why, because the button says Buy. You type a number, you press it, and it feels like paying for groceries.
Look at what left your hands. The dollars left, and Monero showed up. You gave the dollars away. The button still calls that buying, because the button thinks dollars are the money, and they were the thing you let go of.
New Monero does not come from a shop either. Nobody is selling fresh coins for cash. The people whose computers keep it running get paid in new Monero for that work. You might pay the power bill in dollars, and that bill is a real cost, but the bill is not a receipt for the coin.
You already know the other direction when a bill is due. Rent wants dollars, so you hand over some Monero, you get dollars, and you pay. That is buying dollars. Same swap as the button, only now you can feel which thing you wanted.
Most people cannot live in that loop. You need spare money sitting in Monero, enough that a bill is a piece of it and not the whole pile. And if you go in through an app and back out through an app, you pay a fee both times, and on a small amount that fee eats the point. Sending Monero to a person is the cheap part. The door back to dollars is the expensive part. So the sentence can be true, and doing it every week can still be a bad deal.
Dollars get weaker too, because more of them get made, and each one buys a little less than it used to. Getting rid of them starts to look normal once you notice that. You still need some for the bills. Needing them does not make them the money again.
A price going up does not prove this. And if the apps with the Buy button close, the computers that keep Monero running can still get paid in new Monero. If the only way to get it was those apps, the new coins would have stopped.
Where I live, our government has managed to gaslight most of the population into thinking that the inflation rate is currently 3%/yr (0.25%/mo) where I know that the true inflation rate of the local fiat is AT LEAST 6%/yr (0.5%/mo). During the worst part of the COVID inflation, the government managed to gaslight the citizens into thinking that inflation was 9%/yr (0.75%/mo) when it was really much closer to 20%/yr (1.75%/mo).
Now if we hold Monero as money instead (which I do) the inflation rate is 0.85%/yr (0.07%/mo).
It takes 7 months for Monero to "weaken" the same amount as the local fiat currency does in one month. The rate Monero inflates is easily overwhelmed by the rate at which production improves and therefore causes outright deflation in all prices.