Steam seems to patch very quickly so that's never been an issue for me.

Some games patch very poorly due to Steam's update mechanism. Path of Exile is notorious for this, to the point many download the standalone client instead. The issue is that it uses one big file for data and this interacts poorly with steam (a tiny patch will take half an hour to apply after downloading, even on SSD).

Steam updates in the background, so it's not really an issue.

However, the install times are still annoying. I really wish more games had play-while-install features. That being said, Steam downloads so much faster than a PS4 installs. I have a gigabit home connection and can get pretty close to saturating it while downloading from Steam, while the PS4 is slow -- apparently due to some technical limitations of the PS4.

If it is, then the meme is an old one. I haven't had to patch before playing in years. Even new games seem to come patched.

You can stop it doing that in the settings if you please.