No one can realistically claim they truly understand the current system. The Austrian economists seductively claim this, but that's because they reject empiricism as a way of challenging their axioms. Keynes seems to have hit upon the most predictive model we have for how economies operate at scale with currency, especially how we can get into depression-like circumstances when internet rates are 0% like they have been these past 5 years. But we are still debating whether he was a genius, villain, or charlatan, because people refuse to look at the data and arguments with fresh eyes.
So what constitutes a "hack", vs "bug", vs "works as designed" is a matter for debate. You point to the debt ceiling - that's a non-economic political enomaly unique to the USA (and interestingly, iirc, Denmark). It's not so much a hack as a periodic configuration change.
You also mention inflation. Currently there's very little inflation anywhere in the world. We are printing money everywhere, and yet there is no real inflation, not a peep, completely contrary to over 5 years of dire warnings from inflation hawks. Why is that? You'd think there may be a lesson here.
Southern Europe had massive capital inflows from the North during the past 10 years, leading to wage and price inflation. Private excesses led to a massive crash in demand when the financial crisis hit, and a major outflow of capital. So now the South is uncompetitive relative to their Northern neighbors. The typical tool to get more competitive is to drop their exchange rates relative to their peers to bring export prices inline. but with the Euro, they can't do that. So they're stuck in a deflationary spiral - difficult (high unemployment, lowered workforce participation) and destructive (business and livelihoods destroyed and permananent damage to the country's wealth generating capacity) considering prices and wages tend to be sticky downwards and thus don't trend in a nice linear manner.
The above situation doesn't occur quite as suddenly and badly in the USA among its member states because they have fiscal integration, which enables Federal transfers to poorer states to shore them up relative to their peers. Decay and deflation still eventually happens if the underlying reason is structural (see the Detroit area). But Southern Europe itself was a growth story, not a case of mismanagement but rather a victim of reckless investment with no EU system to soften the blow when there is a crisis.
As for the requirements on the money supply, there is plenty of history out there discussing the trouble with previous eras of the gold standard (see the Great Depression), or decentralized free money (the USA had hundreds of currencies in the 18th century- the civil war reparations was the onus to coalesce into a standard Federal reserve currency).
We have switched between predominantly commodity (deflationary) currency and debt-issuance (inflationary) currency for thousands of years. There's dangers on both sides.