I actually really appreciate the GoF book. I don’t use their patterns every day, but it’s definitely driven home the message of carefully thinking about which parts of the system should depend on which other parts, and examples of how you can achieve that. I also find it useful as a reference because many of the more common patterns do show up in people’s code and in libraries and understanding what a singleton/adapter/factory/builder is, does help me in my day to day.

I think the problem are the people who can’t abstract the message of the book and instead use it as their reference for absolutely everything, over-engineering the hell out of things. When I’m asked the sort of questions you describe, I also just ask if they could instead explain the problem, because being able to solve problems is all design patterns are about. If they can’t, I would respectfully ask how their knowledge of the design pattern will then help them in their job.