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If it’s truly digital gold, that will only lead to the demise of the chain as a result of block rewards going down and not enough transaction fees to support the miners. Bitcoin truly has a security budget issue.

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You seem to be arguing that if block reward sufficiently drops, everyone will stop mining and new block cease to be generated. Why would it happen?

If everyone stops mining that it would be enough to run mining on cheapest laptop and collect all the reward.

I didn't say that mining would cease - it's that there would be way less incentive for people to mine, so less hash power, and more susceptible to 51% attacks.

Doesn’t it self regulate? If there is too fewer miners then reward goes up? Also, unlike gold, you can anonymously transport it around the world without getting robbed.

Nitpick: the reward doesn't go up, but the difficulty goes down.

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