The original purpose of patents was to encourage inventors to explicitly share how their invention works. Back in the day (i.e. the 1700s) there were a lot of breakthroughs in mechanical and chemical engineering which helped drive innovation all over the place, but a lot of people who made such breakthroughs would sell their product but not tell anyone how it worked. People could reverse engineer certain products but not everything.
This is called a trade secret, and it's a type of IP that still exists. The formula for Coca-cola for instance is a trade secret IP, not a patent or trademark or copyright.
Then patents came along, with the guarantee that you'd see the sole benefits of your product/invention for the next 20 years if you publicly disclose all of the details about how it works. Then, after 20 years were up other people could sell that too. But because you've disclosed your invention, other inventors and companies can start utilizing techniques or compounds or whatnot that you disclosed in your invention in their own research, and in doing so come up with even newer breakthroughs and inventions.
This is the purpose of patents, to get all of these scientific breakthroughs into public documents so anyone who wants to can read about them and come up with their own ideas that iterate or improve upon them. That's innovation and scientific progress.
Software patents are a different story though. Software patents don't tell you how a function is programmed. There's no discussion of actual individual lines of code or anything to that effect, the wording in software patents is usually along the lines of "a non-transitory computer readable medium with instructions that cause the function of X" where X is something like, "play minigames during a loading screen".
There's no actual disclosure about how a new breakthrough is done. Anyone who sees a game with a minigame during a loading screen would instantly know all of the information provided in the patent. The patent itself does nothing to help foster innovation. If the process of adding that minigame were simply a trade secret that wasn't patented it would make no difference, anybody who knows how to program could do the same thing.
That's the problem with software patents, they do not foster innovation because they do not provide any details about any invention that you wouldn't know just by looking at the product itself. They run directly contrary to the spirit and original purpose of patents.
I agree that patent law is a mess for various reasons, but it's just annoying to see people confidently proclaiming something they clearly have no idea about.
You're not wrong there.