The final release of the Planck data 2018, see this post, invited us to finalize a long project in which we discuss the actual status of Cosmic Inflation with respect to what we have learned about the early universe.
In a quite long preprint [1], we are trying to exhaustively address all the criticisms raised against the inflationary paradigm and confront them to what the Planck data told us. The conclusion is short and summarized in the abstract:
Although we find that important questions still remain open, we conclude that the inflationary paradigm is not in trouble but, on the contrary, has rather been strengthened by the Planck data.
You’re skeptic? Read the paper…