I believe it is inevitable. The way Bitcoin was conceived, with finite supply and a steadily reducing inflation schedule, would have drawn comparisons to gold anyway. I'm also not exactly happy on that, but it is understandable.
I also don't think it holds back Bitcoin or stopped it being a medium of exchange. However, for sure, it boosted the speculative use.
Being a "store of value" is however also a requirement for any medium of exchange which wants to be used not only for very short-term transactions. Fiat for example needs the use case of "saving" too.
To achieve this, i.e. to stabilize, the challenge for Bitcoin is to move from a primarily short-term speculation asset - the "ride the waves" scenario - to a long-term saving asset - "HODL" or "DCA". I believe it's on a good way, but of course the financial sector currently heavily "storming" into Bitcoin with ETFs and other products has highlighted speculative usage again.
The "digital gold" narrative can help with this purpose a bit because it is easy to understand and can also drive people into long-term investments. However, I still think that Bitcoin needs to boost the "currency" usage too, because it's what Bitcoin was originally conceived for, and it's the main use case of cryptocurrencies - the one where censorship resistance is most important.
I know you're pessimistic about Bitcoin in this regard and promote a certain altcoin instead (an altcoin I also like, but let's not go OT here again)
But I see a lot of movement in the second layer development lately which could help with the "use as a currency" issue. BitVM2, Ark, new ideas for LN, even more centralized approaches like Stacks and Nomic, all these could help to make the "currency" usage cheaper and more resilient against spam waves like the Ordinals/Runes waves.
As long as network fees remain high, don't expect people to use Bitcoin as digital cash. It will only serve as a store of value. With volatile market prices, don't expect this to change anytime soon. L2 networks are a great way to encourage the use of BTC as digital cash, but most of them are centralized. So, you're basically sacrificing decentralization out of convenience. Despite the LN's years of development, it has been unable to attract the masses. Perhaps, this has something to do with the complexity involved with opening/closing channels, inbound/outbound capacity, etc. Ease of use is a must if we want to onboard Bitcoiners into L2 networks.
BTC by itself is deflationary, so it's logical prices will go up over time. It's this reason why it's marketed as "digital Gold". Litecoin should've been marketed as "digital Silver" because of its limited supply and similar deflationary mechanics as Bitcoin, but for some reason, it isn't. The coin is widely unpopular compared to the rest of the pack. Oh, well. I wonder if someday BTC will go as far as surpassing Gold's market cap? Only time will tell.
