Conext matters though:
Pasta only had one high scoring season when he signed his contract AND he signed when the overall cat was at a lower number. Inflation essentially will help bump up Nylander and Marner’s contracts
Personally I wouldn’t consider trading a player on their level over disagreement on a dollar value as (relatively) insignificant as 1-1.5 million, but that’s just me.
1-1.5M adds up, if you sign each of the big three like that, you're potentially spending an extra 4.5M, even with the cap potentially increasing, it isn't an insignificant amount, considering that you could be spending that to add another key piece to the team.
If you're spending on a player, and it reasonably limits you from improving/adding positive value to other parts of the team, you're starting to approach negative value for the player, and that's a sign, that you probably overpaid for the player.
I'm ok with signing players to fair and reasonable contracts, and am against undervaluing or overvaluing players if they've earned it and it also doesn't hurt the team. At the end of the day, you want to sign players so that it optimizes the team composition.