I think the complaint is basically that the majority of GoF patterns are better solved simply by having first class functions, and many students won't realize t

I think the complaint is basically that the majority of GoF patterns are better solved simply by having first class functions, and many students won't realize this because they only know languages without them, so they never develop an intuition for seeing such simple ways of solving problems, and instead build complicated machinery to do trivial things. And GoF tends to legitimize this approach in their minds. It's a good book, but it's not a book for beginners.