I am not familiar with XLE, but recently I was debating again on GLD after re-thinking over some things Dalio said about gold.
The problem, I can not justify that high MER for something that may very well just go down for the next 10-20 years. If I am going to go down a gold-route, I would rather just do digital gold and go with Bitcoin. But if I'm going to go bitcoin, I'd rather just buy Ethereum instead and stake at my broker and collect over 4% in dividends while I wait.
I also did a bit of exploration of the gold backed crypto securities, but I'm not fully sold on them just yet.