It also works well in adventures where the "site" is a home base city that the party needs to care about because that's where they keep all their stuff and it would be terribly inconvenient to lose it should the town burn down and even more difficult to move it.I think it pivoted from site based adventures which is just a fancier name for dungeon delving to story based adventures which is much broader in scope. When I think about dungeon delving though, I think about the act of exploring a dungeon room by room, having to map it out, having to find its secrets, etc. There aren’t as many story based reasons to get players to want to do this. If you give players a story goal, their objective becomes that and the act of exploring becomes a time suck, a bottomless pit that they waste resources on.
Finding gold for XP is more conducive to site based adventures where the story is less important - the story is simply that you are exploring THE Tomb of Horrors, THE Temple of Elemental Evil, etc. The location itself is the most important thing, not the NPCs inside it, or the fact that you have to rescue or retrieve some item to prevent some BBEG from taking over the land. Exploring is the juice because exploring is how you find the gold that gets you the XP.
Where it works less well is mindless murderhobos with less ties than frank Castle and a thinner moral fiber than Venom when it comes to murder in broad daylight