As an investment asset, gold has many disadvantages, for example, it does not provide capital appreciation. Let's say I buy shares of a promising company, this company pays dividends, so I expect to receive not only an increase in the price of these shares in the future, but also dividends this year. With these dividends paid to me, I can buy even more shares of this company. This is a very profitable proposition!
This way you can significantly maximize your profit. However, gold does not accrue interest and dividends. Moreover, as a rule, it requires significant storage costs and, as a rule, owning gold is associated with trust in other legal entities, for example, commercial banks.
Gold is considered a good safe-haven asset, but if the economy is doing well, individuals and businesses will invest in stocks and bonds rather than gold bullion.
gold is capital growth and like any other actually good stock they're mostly capital growth, dividend is useless because after distribution of divident the price of the stock usually plummet.
personally I prefer capital growth over dividend, as for the case of gold, I agree it's pretty volatile asset if we're talking about price movement these days, but the growth has been pretty linear, no significant drawdown, it's still good hedge against inflation and its uses is exactly this, basically it come back again to function, if someone want to hoard gold to hedge against inflation feel free to invest in gold anytime but gold only showing its brilliant at the time of geopolitical turmoil, otherwise stock is the way or even better, crypto.