What I think you're missing the understanding of what money is, and the history of money. This is why gold gets brought up.

In the last some thousand years gold evolved as a world standard for trade. Why? It had some good properties; physically tough and lasting, common enough for people to find / rare enough to be difficult to debase (holds value), you can melt it and shape it (divisible), etc. Gold permeated all societies because it was the "winner" of precious metal monies, and good technology tends to spread, giving it network effects.

Your US dollars were originally just paper notes promising redemption for gold at your bank. We traded those notes around because we had enough trust in a system now for it to be convenient for us.

At some point, governments decided it wanted to they wanted more control over money/economy, and essentially forced a fiat standard on the population. This is the great monetary experiment we are living now.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Executive_Order_6102 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bretton_Woods_system

If you can contextualize what money is, the history of money dating back thousands of years, then you can start to see how crypto has a lot of advantages over metal money, as well as fiat money.