I read the white paper a long time ago.  It's incredibly incomplete and also misleading in many ways.  It was just a brief introduction to Bitcoin and it left out many important details about the protocol.

The difference between inflation and issuance was not clearly understood at that time.  Only later when bitcoin started to be explained to normies who are not software engineers, such as yourself, did people who were trying to help others understand begin to bifurcate the words and use them more accurately to facilitate learning and communication.