It's not that going to the Moon was pointless, but stopping after we'd done little more than planted a flag was. Werner von Braun was the head architect of the Apollo Program and the Moon was intended as little more than a stepping stone towards setting up a permanent colony on Mars. Incidentally this is also the technical and ideological foundation of what would become the Space Shuttle and ISS, which were both also supposed to be little more than small scale tools on this mission, as opposed to ends in and of themselves.

Imagine if Columbus verified that the New World existed, planted a flag, came back - and then everything was cancelled. Or similarly for literally any colonization effort ever. That was the one downside of the space race - what we did was completely nonsensical, and made sense only because of the context of it being a 'race' and politicians having no greater vision than beyond the tip of their nose.