Many of the popular design patterns are simply lambda. If you have first-class functions, they are trivial. But Java doesn't have first-class functions; instead you have to write a giant thing that looks like a class, and because that feels like a lot of work, it seems to deserve a fancy name like Observer or Strategy. But it's all fabricated work; the only reason you have to do it is that the language has this stupid weakness.

It's as though you were working in a language that didn't have lists. And one day you realize, hey, it's useful to be able to manipulate variable-length collections of things. So you look at a problem and say "Aha, this is exactly the place that we should use a Collection design pattern" and you go write the entire implementation of lists from scratch and feel satisfied that you did a good day's work. You tell all the programmers you know that there is this great design pattern called a "Collection" that they should all start using. You write books about it. You give workshops. You get really good at writing list implementations, because every time you need one you implement a new list from scratch.

When you tell a Python programmer this, she looks at you like you have lost your mind, writes a function that takes a list, solves the problem in 5 minutes, and gets on with her day.

Qt was also born in that era, and look at how strikingly similar its standard library is to Java's in many cases, and how unlike STL and Boost.

I cannot speak for Boost, but STL is also not free of OOP as such, iostreams, data-structures, allocators.

ATL was all about using templates, as optimization or not, one is on template land when using ATL, it is even part of the name.