You are correct; the point of gold plated contacts is anti-corrosion and long service life not for absolute highest conductivity.

I'm a ham radio operator; I have some silver-plated antenna connectors, because antenna feedlines are dealing with extremely weak signals on receive, so any loss you can eliminate in the connector the better. Problem is they corrode to hell everywhere they aren't tightly screwed together. For consumer AV equipment the signals are basically never weak enough to bother with that.

I would think most audiophiles know this?

They're not marketing to audiophiles. They're marketing to dudes and dads. They aren't trying to get the guy hooking a manual turntable up to a tube amplifier, they're trying to get the guy attaching a PS5 to an LG TV to a Sonos soundbar. They're going for the guy who is spending middle class money on AV equipment without bothering to understand it.

Wish I'd thought of it.

Yes

Gold plated connections have a point, it prevents corrosion extending the life of the cable. Whether you think it worth that price is another thing entirely.

There's always been a group of audiophiles with more money than sense. To the point that "audiophile" almost feels like an insult to me, and I'm a man who...well...loves his audio. They should have a word for that.

Unidirectional cables are very silly. I fixed a 300 foot unidirectional HDMI installed backwards during construction. I had to army crawl over ductwork.

Directional cables kind of make sense in an analogue, single-ended connection if it’s about the shielding being connected to ground only on one side… although I haven’t tried it in practice. Still, it has nothing to do with signal directionality, just noise rejection. The ground lift switch on some devices does the same.

The cable is fiber optic, which is to say light. Light don't care about gold and silver. The highly polished lens bit is probably also bullshit, but at least light cares about lenses.

More generally, it’s not that cables are bad, it’s that audiophiles have way more money than sense. I’m not exaggerating when i say that I’ve seen short speaker cables sell for £6,000. Anything more than £5 will be of exactly the same quality as the £5 cable. You could maybe argue me up to £15-20.

This is a classic.

A few years back in a HiFi - fair there was a seller who pushed these fist sized wooden blocks that were meant to raise the cables off the ground and therefore "prevent the Earth itself from tampering with the signal".

So he was basically trying to sell very expensive magic wood.

But do coat hangers hold up to repeated use ?

That's a classic and I am glad it see it passed around again. The best part is the people that start delving into the snake oil absurdity that is "audiophile cables" before, you know, getting better actual speakers/headphones. Like for fucks sake, your $200 fancy cable isn't going to make your bullshit bargain bookshelf speaker into the voice of god. Just get some half way decent equipment and listen to your actual music.

It's called SCIENCE sweaty

Hey man, you realize everytime you turn on your stereo your couch starts sliding towards it?

Just as important is what they connect to. You know the plastic part it connects to inside whatever device you are connecting to. Same concept when monster cables were a thing, the gold plated connectors that connect to the back of your tv using plastic and undefined metal.