FWiW I'm pretty solidly in the "gold is mostly useless" camp .. and that's with a "real" Engineering background, decades in exploration geophysics, and even some contracts building bespoke instrumentation for one of the largest gold mines on the planet.
It's highly desirable for corrosion free stable sheilding and connections in high end space tech, other than that most jobs have cheaper more or less as effective alternatives - outside of religion and making pretty things .. which are nice but non essential.
Come the apocolypse it might have trading value, it might not .. in deeply rural farming areas handshakes have more currency than money in any case .. it's about making deals that you can trust to be held six months or eighteen months down the line that is of value .. whether these are tokenised via cash, cheque, or gold is a small detail aside.
