That's funny - we just threw out a bunch of cheaper gold-plated probes in the trash yesterday - just about 100% crap compared to Keysight / Fluke probes for what we do. We should have sent them to Dave for a "squiz" as he puts it.
You'll probably never use a probe on its side as Dave was demonstrating. The very tip is the business end, and might last a while as long as you're not trying to weld with it on high current range. We make the young lab techs pay for the good probes when they try that....
Dave is not completely wrong - The gold does really help initially but if there a hard pin substrate underneath the gold and the gold about 100x softer - at the sharp tip if you look under a 'scope that gold is gone in about 3 or 4 minutes of use. The gold just doesn't last long at the very tip - unless you are using very, very light pressure and you're touching a gold pad anyway.
For what we need (most times) a good probe tip should be hard & sharp enough for repeated probing possibly thru conformal board coatings or getting a good contact on an SMD pin.
Look at those gold plated tips under a high mag scope after just a few tests where you have to push it onto a trace with some force (maybe with coating) and you'll see that magical gold isn't doing much. Wiping across a row of contacts can strip the gold off faster. Usually the sharp part of the tip has mealed over a bit and the real conductor is whatever is under the gold anyway.
We've even tried some expensive heavy plated versions (something like 50 micro inch plating) and they did last a little better, but not as long-term cost effective as the good quality standard probes.
If you're doing a lot of work on gold pads and use very light pressure, the gold tip might be OK, but I wouldn't ever recommend it for general use.