OP, I think you are fighting the last war. VBTLX has returned 5.38% in the last year, which seems pretty OK to me. Since the bottom in October 2023, it's up 13.5%.
The latest data shows that inflation has been tamed for 1.5-2 years, other than the weirdly lagging way that the Fed uses to calculate inflation for housing. See the attached graphs from Scott Grannis' excellent economic blog. In the last few months, even that owner's equivalent rent calculation finally caught up, so the latest inflation numbers are essentially at the Fed target. Are the hundreds of millions of bond investors with their trillions of $ in the bond market somehow overlooking a risk that you perceive accurately?
Bond funds take an immediate NAV hit when interest rates rise as they did in 2022, then start to earn at the new, higher interest rate immediately. Ladders held to maturity are no solution, they simply spread the pain of having bought low interest bond contracts out over the duration by returning low interest for years after the market has moved on. The difference in approach between ladders held to maturity and funds has to be as close to zero as bond players can make it or someone else would jump in and arbitrage it. If you hold bonds in taxable, holding to maturity eliminates tax loss harvesting, so the government doesn't even get to pay for part of your pain.
We should recognize that the 2022-2023 bout of inflation was due to a global pandemic and the government's response. The government (both parties) tried to prevent breadlines and a depression by printing lots and lots of COVID relief money. In 2020 and part of 2021, folks held that printed money as there was nothing to spend it on and no one knew how bad things were going to get. When folks realized that it was not going to be a zombie apocalypse, they started to spend the printed money, and we got the 2022-2023 inflation. The market says that today's noise about the future is nothing compared to that.