I think the simple reason that the public widely believes that inflation is high now even though it has been at a roughly average rate for over a year is because they are mixing up inflation with prices.
The common understanding of inflation is "high prices" not "increasing prices." 2022 saw an inflation rate that was higher than many Americans have any memory of. The prices went up, and then stopped going up by the end of 2022. But they did not go down. So a lot of people think we have "high inflation" because prices are higher than they were in 2021. The fact that prices have not increased even more since the end of 2022 is not much of a comfort because prices are still higher than what they remember paying in the recent past.
