I think it all boils down to whether or not Erdogan feels like he has the international clout to go all out on annihilating the Kurds. This really just depends on the US' willingness to punish the Turkish state if it interferes with its own ambitions in the region.
It's even more complicated than that. "The Kurds" are not a monolithic entity. The Syrian Kurds are far more revolutionary and sympathetic to the PKK in Turkey, and more than a few truckloads of American supplied weapons have gone missing and ended up in Turkey in the hands of the PKK. Not that I care, Turkey can eat a bag of dicks, but thems the brakes. The Syrian Kurds are basically cowboys. They don't really give a fuck about Turkey or Syria or geopolitics in general and just aggressively work towards their own goals. They are also generally Kurdish nationalists. They would like to see an independent Kurdistan. This puts them at odds with Iraqi Kurdistan and the Peshmerga, which explicitly do not want an independent Kurdistan, and view the cowboy behavior of the YPG as potentially fucking up the good thing the Iraqi Kurds have going on. There's a lot of friction between the Peshmerga and YPG.
Bashar Al-Assad's staying power depended on Putin's support.
And Iran and their proxies, mostly Hezbollah. Obviously this dried up when Ukraine and Israel kicked off.
Assad didn't command the respect dictators like Gaddafi cultivated.
Their power based were different. As I stated earlier, Gaddafi's power came from the fact that his tribe was very powerful, and he secured the loyalty of other powerful tribes via a complex patronage system. Assad, meanwhile, was an Alawite. The Alawites are weird. I won't go into it all here but basically they're technically Muslim but also are an independent ethno-religious group that has its own beliefs. They are a sizeable minority, between 10-15% of the Syrian population depending on the numbers you use, but have a significantly outsized representation in the political and management classes, so they, for a long time, have dominated the political and economic sectors of the country. That's where Assad has historically gotten his powe from.
NATO claims he was a military dictator that pretended to be a socialist that had revolutionary councils running the country, but that he would just overrule them and imprison dissenters if he didn't agree with them.
Yeah in a nutshell, pretty much. He also did shit like provide arms to anti government groups in Europe and bombed civilian airliners full of Europeans and Americans.
Supporters of Gaddafi claimed Gaddafi was the reason the quality of life was so high, and the real reason NATO overthrew him was to stop Libya from using Gold Bars as the new Libyan Dinar.
Oil money and Soviet aid. Additionally, see the above parts about supplying European insurgents and blowing up civilians. Libya didn't have the gold resources and didn't have the money to go to a gold standard, I can assure you that was definitely not in the cards, especially for a socialist country. Additionally, it would make tribes not aligned with Gaddafi less reliant on the government, because who gave a shit about the Libyan sand token? The only people that would accept it are other Libyans. If he went to a gold standard, or even a gold currency as you said, immediately these potential trouble groups have the ability to import goods and trade with the outside world without going through an intermediary.
stability Gaddafi had to offer. I doubt Hillary Clinton and Dubya would want to experience the current life of Libyans over life during the Ghaddafi years if they were forced to wear their shoes.
Here's the deal though, the Libyan Civil War was not the result of NATO meddling. While you can argue that Gaddafi might have won without NATO intervention, NATO merely intervened in an ongoing event. Gaddafi's power base was already crumbling, and the economy was already on a long downward slide.
He dipped out because his position was untenable. The SAA had been hollowed out by 13 years of civil war, the economic infrastructure was in shambles, and what economic apparatus that still existed was being exploited by Iran and Russia. Once the rebels came out swinging and it was clear the Russians and Iranians weren't saving him this time, he knew it was time to leave. There was simply no gas left in the tank.