If there's a serious financial disaster, cans of beans are going to be worth more than physical gold anyway.

If there is a serious societal collapse, gold is going to be the last thing on your mind. Bullets, fuel, tools... trust relationships with other people... all infinitely more valuable than gold in a crisis. People who own physical gold are preparing for an extremely unlikely event, where society has collapsed in a very specific way.

A HAM radio and the skills to operate it would be worth more than its weight in gold in many disaster scenarios.

If all the precious metals chatter I heard when I was into collecting, e.g., Peace Dollars is true, you can't actually take delivery of Comex gold you "own", even in non-panic times, and also that there was many times more "ownership" than there was actual corresponding gold. And then the conspiracy theories go up from there. :)

Not knowing how much this is true, my impression, as a layperson, is that the claims would mean investment gold was more of a financial mechanism that only works because everyone is playing along that it has certain value governed by certain rules. If that's true, I don't know when the rules would stop or change. I decided I'd rather just plow my savings into total-market index investing of US stocks, than blindly guess about how and when gold would help.

Which is nonsense. Hyperinflation can occur without the financial system crumbling. And in that scenario you’ll be glad you had a position in gold, even just digitally.