It’s more covert. Printing money sounds not right even to elementary 3rd graders. By complicating the process and pretending to borrow, the whole thing sounds much more financially sound. That’s really what this is mainly about.
Also, this process greatly benefits the banks. Most of this government debt is not bought by the Fed directly, but by commercial banks. The government privilege granted to banks to operate with fractional reserves in a cartel like structure under the guidance and coordination of the Central bank, allows them to gain enormous purchasing power at the expense of the public. This also creates for the government more potential buyers for their debt without any apparent signs of deliberate government inflation.
It is not possible for the government to print money whenever they need it without direct political control over the printing press.
Which almost all economists agree is a bad idea.
In a system with “independent” central banks the government have to issue bonds to the central bank to get more money. While the central banks being unaffected by short term political goals can tend to inflation targets and refuse to buy so many bonds it would cause damaging levels of inflation
That is the general idea of the current system.
It doesn’t work at all as well as they want us to believe obviously. But it does create at least some kind of institutional inertia for excessive using of the printing press, which is slightly better then leaving it in the direct control of elected politicians.