> Attempting to learn mathematics as some sort of pattern matching, which is where having large sets of questions and answers to study is useful, does not work

This is how mathematics works for most students.
They get a set of problems, then a (poorly explained) set of tools and they try to apply those tools to solve the problems during tests. Then they leave school and never use those tools again - they often completely forget about them. In Eastern Europe they even call it the "memorize->get drunk->forget" cycle.

Arguably, this is the experience of most people, in most fields of study. This pattern matching does not only happen in maths. Most Bachelor's and Master's thesis are basically a compilation of quotes from various books and papers - without any new ideas, or original research. Maybe I am cynical, but in my opinion you are discouraged to make any original research even while getting a PHD as well. Your thesis is more about quoting the "right people" (= quoting papers of the people who will be promoting you), than doing anything new, or original.

But coming back to the question of actual education: the article clearly shows the experience of most people at Universities. If they want to 'learn for the sake of learning' you will get very discouraged fast, your experience will be very miserable - the university is not there to broaden your horizons, it is just a combination of a testing facility and a diploma mill.
What is even sadder is that if you are laser focused to learn something that will be useful at work.. then you will get disappointed as well. The things taught at universities are often not even applicable at academia, not to mention "real" work. Writing a master's thesis teaches you how to write a master's thesis (assuming someone even properly teaches you how to do that, for me they just told us to write one, without even bothering to show few other ones as examples - I had to get those myself). It still teaches you something, but that something is not good enough for real academia or real work.
In addition, since lots of lectures are graded on basis of tests, universities often feel like a glorified highschool. And you know what? Probably we cannot have it better: most people wont make original research - because it is hard, so universities are stuck with the tests and papers (that are a collection of unoriginal quotes). Also you need to learn to walk before you run, how are you supposed to write a good original thesis, if you didnt write a single non-original thesis, what is much easier?

The main reason why the blog's author was disappointed is the systematic problem of rewards for university professors. They arent really rewarded for doing more than the minimum. They have their own rat race, with their own reward structure, that rewards "research", understood mostly are publishing quotable papers, sometimes getting grants. Changing the reward structure would help a lot - those who focus on teaching, should be rewarded better. Universities supposedly are for students, but most of the time it feels like students are an unwelcome afterthought for the research professors.
Also, professors seem to like to say that "if you want to learn a trade, go to college - university is there to broaden your horizons" - what is obvious bullshit, college seems to be the same as university, but just with a worse diploma at the end. [as a thought experiment: would the professors teach better, if their pay would be related to the salaries achieved by their students - ignoring GDPR, PII for a moment? if the professors could get a "share" of their students incomes, would they teach better? now in USA the students are obliged to pay their tuition with 0 impact on the quality of the received education, or in Europe receive free education]

Then we have those "good universities". USA has this corrupted system of admissions (probably so that students with best results dont take 100% of the available spots - universities want those sweet donations from rich people for taking in their children... so they use the admissions process to allow them in, what is completely not meritocratic). Yet in most good schools you are still supposed to know the subject before you even start to study it: if you go to study French, you are supposed to learn French in high school (reality is that: probably your rich parents sponsored you tutoring, there are very few kids who do it on their own), if you are supposed to learn programming - you are supposed to learn it before, on your own time...
Which kind of proves the point that universities fail at teaching. Those students who knew how to speak French before joining the university, or those who knew how to program before coming to a CS course -> they were already good before they even joined the university. Are they now "great" because they later got an university education? Or did they get into a good university, because they were already destined to be "great" and the diploma is just a rubber stamp? One could say that perhaps they were unrefined stones and the universities polished them into diamonds, but I somehow doubt that. Were your fellow students unpolished diamonds, or more like morons?

Coming back to this "pattern matching". This is how education work (life?) goes for most people - do repeatable things again and again. The running joke among programmers (who are a creative job) is that code is routenely copied from stackoverflow and glued together - isnt that the definition of pattern matching? The hard stuff is done by others (either those few very smart, or those laser-focused on one thing), so most of the time you try to find the pattern that solves your problem. For every programmer doing complicated algorithms, there are probably 99 adding a button to some CRUD [source my ass], what can also be complicated, but for other reasons :)