You know as far as metal goes, gold is actually kinda useless. I mean it doesn’t react or anything, but apart from looking good, it’s not all that useful. Gold is too soft to make anything useful, in fact they have to be alloyed to make them durable enough to use as coins or jewelry (because 24K gold would wear out really quickly if used as working coins or anything you wear). Gold is not really a good conductor at all (but it does not tarnish, so they coat electrical contacts with it). Except for some limited use, gold does not react with much at all nor does it catalyze things like platinum does.
And there are plenty of metals (plutonium and uranium for one) that costs much more per gram than gold.
Actually, until very recently steel was valuable too. It took a lot of labor to produce steel before industrialization, and as a result a suit of armor cost as much as a castle.
I mean I can see why ancient people thought gold was valuable because of its bling or whatever, but honestly these days, especially if we keep finding gold deposits, gold should become less and less valuable.
