Patents are (at their core) a good thing. It protects little Jimmy Inventor from putting hours and his blood, sweat and tears into coming up with a novel invention, only for some big corpo to see it, steal the idea and bully Jimmy out of the market.
Jimmy has legal recourse to sue the big corpo if he has a patent, whereas without one he has nothing.
Just because the system's been gamed (especially in the US) doesn't mean it's impossible to reform, and is currently still better than nothing.
Definitely wouldn't be surprised - MS have been making noises about reducing the level of access non-core Windows services get after the cloudstrike fiasco, and given MS's patch stability lately, I would also not be surprised if something leaked out early.