It's a speculative bubble too. It has a base case of value, as you observe, so it probably won't collapse to nothing and will remain an industrial commodity for the forseeable future, but I'm pretty sure the value will collapse to something more like its actual industrial value (with a bounce to below that value) as soon as it is clear that the economy has recovered. (Which on sufficiently long time scales is quite probable, but I make no claims about what may or may not happen between then and now.)

I've considered a strategy of buying gold post-collapse on the grounds that on the 30-year business cycle, gold will probably be spiking again in the next financial crisis at right about the time I'd be retiring, but that's 100% pure speculation, not buying for "intrinsic" value... but then, I scare quote the term since there really is no such thing.

I also think investing in gold in the case of total collapse is a bit bizarre, because in the event society totally collapses, the only gold that will be worth anything is the stuff in your physical possession, not numbers in your bank account, which the government trivially confiscated (shortly before it discovered that doesn't prevent collapse either, because the government's problem was never having enough numbers in computers). (They can confiscate physical gold too, of course, it's just not trivial.) I know that's not the motivation of every gold bug, though.