This is more Anecdotal than a rigorous scientific review.

Technical but FUN read …

I occasionally  saw Dr. Guth at MIT in Grad school ( I was still an undergrad).

I nevertheless knew relatively well his colleague Dr. Henry Tye who went  on to become a String Theorist at Cornell.

I am (like many others) uncomfortable about hyper-inflation (whether it is economic or cosmic :-)).

With cosmic hyperinflation space expands (but it is a void expansion????) at speeds much greater than the speed of light.

Could this be a dark energy/ dark matter phenomenon ?

You heard it here first folks !

But yes, cosmic inflation explains the near “isotropy” of the Universe ….