You seem to NOT understand gold.
There is only one form of gold, and it is physical. The representations of gold (digital or paper) is not real gold, and your calling it "modern" gold shows that you are trying to gloss over the whole idea of what is gold and shows that you don't know what is gold.
The "digital" "paper" "modern" forms of gold are derivative products of gold, and in reality, each non-physical representation of gold is supposed to be backed up by actual physical gold, otherwise the claims on gold are inflating gold's supply - which is exactly a decent part of gold's current problems, its historical problems and even why paper money ended up winning out over gold..
In other words, there are likely 100s of claims of gold ounces for every gold ounce that actually exist. That is a problem, and your lecturing about gold supposedly existing in some other form (other than physical) shows that you seem to want to just agree with your own deception about gold's supposed value.
Gold's physicality becomes part of its own undermining, since it can sometimes be difficult to take claim to the physical, and laymen also will frequently have troubles verifying gold, transporting it, handling it, safe keeping it. Therefore, elaborate systems have been created to custody and verify gold, and even though many of us know that gold shenanigan's are taking place, 3rd party custodians attempt to gain credibility in terms of proclaiming that they actually have the gold that they claim to have.
Surely we recognize and appreciate that Bitcoin is digitally native, and so therefore bitcoin can be verified digitally and bitcoin's lack of physicality causes it to be easy to transport, store and verify... including to take possession of it in the event that there might be questions about whether any third party actually has the bitcoin that they claim to have.... yet these days there are still attempts to lock folks into contracts in which they cannot physically take possession of the actual bitcoin..
So bitcoin has a lot of derivative products as well that are likely attempting to manipulate bitcoin in similar ways as they did with gold, even though surely bitcoin is a lot more easy to transport, store, and verify, so even if there are going to be ongoing attempts to manipulate and fractionally reserve bitcoin, bitcoin will still provide challenges to those attempts - and it is not clear if bitcoin is going to suffer gold's same fate, yet we can still invest in bitcoin to the extent that we recognize and appreciate that it is superior to both gold and to paper money and also we might even assess bitcoin to be somewhere in the ballpark of 1,000x or more greater than gold.. even though today, bitcoin ONLY has an actual market price that is about 1/10th the size of gold's (if we compare the market caps of each of them).
You made great point that physical gold is only true form of gold and things like digital or paper gold are just stand ins that can make it look like there is more gold than there really is problem that even affected gold past. This is different from Bitcoin which is completely digital making it easy to check send and store without needing physical place or third party to hold it for you. While both gold and Bitcoin can have other products that try to control their price Bitcoin nature makes it harder to manipulate in same ways as gold showing it might be better option than both gold and regular money.
I think if we want to invest in a digital asset, my advice is to choose Bitcoin. Since its inception, Bitcoin has been a clearly digital investment asset. Gold, on the other hand, is a physical asset, so I don't think buying digital gold is a viable option. As far as I know, when investing in digital gold, we're only given transaction records on our phones, and we can't actually hold the gold. I don't think this is safe, as we're vulnerable to fraud. The data might show that we're buying gold, but in reality, the gold doesn't exist. Therefore, if we want to invest digitally, I think Bitcoin is the perfect choice. Although Bitcoin doesn't have a physical form, it has a robust blockchain system, which is decentralized, and when we buy Bitcoin, our Bitcoins are inviolable by others. That's why I personally prefer Bitcoin over gold when it comes to digital investments.
your point is very clear, trustless of these transparent nature of the bitcoin or blockchain it gives it clean view of the edge when it comes to the digital investment with bitcoin we don't have to rely on the second or third party that promises you hope that asset we pay immediately. for digital gold often feels like figures on the screen with very low backing clarity, bitcoin may not be physical but its can be of a security and decentralization that's speak volumes , for anyone that's very serious about investing in digitally then bitcoin is smarter and very saver