The emphasis is on "gradual," here. If the jobs market stayed hot no matter what, and it was impossible to find workers for any open position, it would crater the economy in other ways. The goal is to have a roughly equal amount of jobs and people who want them.
If you have too many people and not enough jobs, you've got mass unemployment, which is bad for everyone. If you've got too many jobs and not enough people, you leave needed positions unfilled and businesses fail because they simply can't get the employees they need, which is also bad for everyone.
Unemployment is also much easier to address than worker shortage. Paying for welfare of the unemployed is far preferable than importation of labour, or a export/downgrade of jobs/companies.
Similar our gripe with inflation as it hurts us a lot but the pains of deflation is a completely different magnitude of hurt on everyone who has debt.
Worker's leverage diminished back to negligible levels!
Capitalists and their doting sycophant peasants rejoice!
Peasants happy about the fed getting what it wants, Jesus Fucking Christ.
Reminder: The fed wants you to provide maximum value, working under the most efficient (harshest) conditions, for the minimum compensation possible so that meaningful shareholders scores go up. To be clear, that almost certainly isn't you.
I was very skeptical of high inflation and the job market, and although the tech industry has lost quite a bit of steam, overall the economy is doing much better than I expected. Good job, Federal Reserve.
There's a million signs that inflation is in a good spot, and also the near inevitability of headline inflation increasing in the next month or two because volatile food and energy prices have dragged it lower the last couple months. Just hope there isn't an overreaction when that happens.