Would you stay at an employer that says you will never get a raise?

This year I got an exceptional review, I went above and beyond and the company gave me the best annual review score that had to be personally approved by the board of directors. Since inflation for PC200 is already at 3,58% I was expecting a 3-5% raise which seems fair for a performance that is exceptional and taking into account the high index.

To my surprise I got nothing, and HR indicated that as long as I stay in my current role I will never get a raise because I am already at the maximum they are willing to pay. (to clarify: I am an IT technical project lead with 16 years of experience and earn 3900 gross, so in no way am I overpaid, but I still have an IT engineer job title). The company is a large multinational which had their best financial year ever. I am the single point of contact for any IT related projects or escalations. The rest of the IT team are juniors who are around 3500-3600 gross. I only joined the company 1 year ago as engineer but quickly grew out of that role because of my prior experience, so this is also my first annual review.

I really love my job and its safe to say I'm good at what I do, but I feel disappointed and betrayed by my employer. It doesn't make any sense, they hired a headhunter to find my profile, paid thousands of euros to that headhunter for finding me, and now they are doing zero effort to reward me and keep me motivated.

I am thinking what my options are, and so far I came up with:

- Find another job, the most obvious one, but as I said I love my current job (as lead).

- Quiet quitting (meaning: I will only do the tasks listed in my engineer role, which means no more project lead and just dumb down what I do).

- Ask to get promoted, but do I really want to invest another year in this company for empty promises? The promotion would have to start immediately, and not January 2026.

Anyone been in a similar situation? I've lost all motivation to even go to work on Monday.