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Damn near, if not entirely, everything has monetary value to someone. Someone is going to want the premium features without putting in the work; they can buy coins from the people that do put in the work to buy the premium features.

The introduction of karma/upvotes had a similar impact on forums, and eventually led to forums improving in quality.

You could see karma/upvotes as a sort of proto-money, with a limited range of monetary qualities.

This just takes the same effect, and magnifies it, by fully monetizing those points, so I anticipate it will lead to better content and curation, just as karma/upvotes did when introduced.

I personally think it would definitely be useful to use the metric even without monetary value - imagine Reddit communities where the contributors have real, direct influence over rules, moderation style, mod team.

Why would that work?

The job of moderation is soul sucking and involves rule creation and rule enforcement. You end up dealing with rule breakers regularly as opposed to only occasionally, skewing your perspective.

There is little overlap with content creation.