Regarding your second point. I'm not sure about Gold not being an investment. Sure, a pound of gold can buy you an F-150, and I'd much rather have an F-150 than a pound of a shiny rock. But there is legit demand for gold across the world for jewelry. And they believe they have mined roughly 80% of the world's total stock of gold. For this reason, I believe it is an investment in the same way rare art is an investment.
I don't disagree with that except to quibble. I would still consider putting money in gold to be speculation rather than investment because it requires that in the future, someone else will be willing to buy it from you for a price higher than the current market. This is categorically different than a stock or bond where there is an underlying revenue stream to value and assess to determine if the market price is roughly accurate.
With that said, gold is still a precious, rare metal that has historically been both a way to store value similar to cash and, in times of calamity, a lingua franca currency. In other words, I consider buying gold to be betting rather than investing but I don't consider it to be a sucker's bet, like I do with crypto.
To go back to crypto, I think it fits a special psychological need for the people who go crazy over it that explains most of the mania over it. There is an appeal to a certain subsection of the population to a currency that is not attached to a sovereign government. I don't understand that appeal because, as you state, I'll take my money in dollars because the dollar is backed by the US Government and all the power that entails.
Aside from crypto not being attached to a sovereign nation, it is conceptually the same to convert dollars to bitcoin, yuan, or dinars. So there has to be something else that explains the mania.