Gold is an amazing element with very many applications. Due to its rarity on the mantle and difficulty in extracting it we use inferior, still expensive, but far more affordable alternatives (I.e. copper for many, but not all, applications).
Othewise your mobo manufacturer wouldn’t have blown it’s margins putting gold traces. And a Chinese “recycler” wouldn’t give up their health to recover it.
And this is without going into the aesthetics of gold. As engineers I guess many of us are uncomfortable with something as hard to quantity as aesthetics, but Au is almost universally considered pretty. Few metals aren’t off grey, and those that are tarnish.
So no, there wasn’t a council of info-Europeans and African tribes 10k years ago to decide that Au is worth a lot just because.