Tools and commodities (and to a large extent, skills) are not subject to
someone else valuing them, and this sets them apart from either purely
fiat money or gold.
Most of those survival scenarios are for a complete collapse. What value
has gold if every one around you needs food and no one has seeds or it is
the dead of winter? It is a partial collapse that gold provides the safety
net, you can flee to a stable situation where gold has value. I have read
of Vietnamese wrapping themselves with gold thread and the original purpose
of gold chains was to provide a very portable bank.
In a survival situation where there was no stable place to flee or you did
not expect a return to stability skills would become much more
valuable. The ability to get a Diesel engine running on vegetable oil
would be more valuable than a bag of silver coins.
So how you structure your survival portfolio depends entirely how you
expect things to turn out. I have always said if we have TEOTWAWNI, I want
to be in the middle of a huge junk yard.