I agree it's comical, and that it's a lot of intense repetitive drudgery. Pointless? I dunno. I wouldn't call art or decoration pointless.
Images of 20th Century factories can be gloomy or downright gruesome, but there's an optimism in it too. Those factory jobs were safer and gentler than backbreaking agricultural labour. People tried hard to get them.
Oddly enough they still miss them too. Lot of British nostalgia for the days when they made _things_. Gold leaf might seem useless to us, but how useless do we seem to them with our marketing, our software startups that mostly go nowhere, our YouTube influencers, our Uber and Deliveroo quasi-jobs. I don't actually have much sympathy for that nostalgia, I find it grotesque when they want to do shit like keep coal mines open, but I get where they're coming from.
"For each ounce of gold prepared in this way, an average of 1 mans fingertip, and 2 women's wrists are required to be destroyed. A hearkening back to the golden age of British industry!"