Dunno. For a scam it's been held by an awful lot of central banks, for many decades, who you might think would figure these things out.

Re inflation it has historically been good at being fairly constant in value in real terms which is not usually what you actually want in an investment - you want them to go up.

Here's the famous graph from Stocks for the Long Run with the 200 year track record https://occaminvesting.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/Stoc...

That shows stocks as the best, though for a reasonably enterprising private investor rental property probably wins.