Gold is a commodity, but it’s got a number of qualities that make it fairly unique among commodities for use as a value store.
It’s very value dense. One can carry a significant amount of wealth in gold. Can’t do that with oil or pork bellies.
It’s very liquid, as commodities go. You can likely get a substantial portion of the melt value of your gold in any city of 100k or more anywhere in the world.
It doesn’t go bad or degrade (easily).
It has a history of being a value store, which means that people treat it like a value store, and tend to retreat to it in times of monetary upheaval.
Like, it’s one thing to say that gold is valued as it is for mostly arbitrary historical/psychological reasons. That’s true. But you can’t use that to discount the real effect that those have. Because history and psychology have real effects on the world! If a huge number of people labored under the delusion that pork bellies were a good inflation hedge, they would actually become a better inflation hedge because people would preferentially buy them when they were worried about inflation.
My father had braces on his teeth during WWII. Gold was used for the teeth bands (it used to be that instead of gluing the brackets right onto your teeth, they put bands around your teeth, and then fastened the brackets to those). They were using gold, I think mainly because most other metals like nickel, steel and copper were needed for munitions.
I have no idea if gold couldn’t be used in munitions, or it was to expensive, because it couldn’t be retrieved. According to my father, his father paid a deposit on the gold in his braces, then after they were removed, the orthodontist reclaimed the gold, and his father got the gold deposit back. I don’t know if it was for the full amount of the gold, or not.
My father is smiling closed-mouthed in every picture of him between the time his adult teeth came in, and the braces came off.
I can guess he had some pretty messed up teeth for a Depression-born kid to get braces during a world war.
Getting back to the OP, a good benchmark might be tellurium. Its about as common in the earths crust as gold. It is used in solar panels, I don’t have a good cite for this but cobbling together a few numbers from over the internet, I think that around 1,700 metric tons of tellurium are used world wide in industry (maybe a bit less), as compared to 700 metric tons of gold (not counting jewelry).
Its price has fluctuated a lot over the last decade when solar panel demand caused a spike which then crashed in 2011 as production increased. So prices ranged from $30 to $450 perk kg. Still its much much cheaper than gold.
Intrinsic value is bullshit. Value or worth are always relative. Something value or worth is exactly what a buyer and seller agree upon. If I’m really really hungry, a dozen shiny fat gold coins might not be enough to buy your scrawny chicken. What, $2000 for a fried wing? It’s cheaper than starving.
Nothing has inherent value. It has only the value people extrinsically and arbitrarily ascribe to it, except for those things necessary to stay alive (ironically air and water are pretty cheap).
The purpose of gold-plating electrical contacts is to prevent corrosion, which is practical or even necessary for some contacts in some applications. For audio equipment, though, yes, it’s mostly a scam.