I think the main thing you gotta remember for the gold blocks is that you can position yourself around them in any way, so long as you stood in the necessary spot in the past, so seeing the result of seemingly useless detours from earlier could put everything into perspective
Yeah, my problem was trying to get both gold statues under the silver sigil. Finally realized how to get them to cross paths so that my undos didn't keep putting a silver in my way, and then, as you said it was mostly a matter of filling up the undo buffer with enough moves to get around. Finally solved (and, I think, optimized) it.