Gold wasn't ever even supposed to be that. When raldi (iirc) wrote the original gold system, it was just supposed to be a donator thing. Buy the gold stuff, and you get an award in your achievements thing, access to r/lounge, ability to keep track of what you've seen previously (persistent, not just in a cookie), and "extended" pages (load a full thousand comments, etc). The XKCD merch stuff was just another goodie to sweeten the pile (reddit's original merch store was just hosted through XKCD).

Gold gifting started out fairly clunky; you had to go to someone's userpage, and then there was a tiny "buy gold" link in the sidebar. The post/comment upsells came later, but were still pretty minor

Then sometime in the middle of the 10s, it turned into a meme, along with other features like snoovatars, avatars, profile posts, bios, and then eventually all of the new reddit slop, which seemed to run counter to the original idea of reddit: the content is more important than who is posting it. This old, long dead ideal, was what really distinguished reddit from Digg. Digg would give higher "karma" users votes more weight, and would rank their submissions higher. Reddit, on the other hand, barely acknowledged users. Wasn't quite the full-on Anon of 4chan, but who made the post was never supposed to be the focus. There's a reason why old reddit, the bylines are rather small compared to the posts and comments themselves