I guess if we want to get really abstract, we can say that the Abstract Factory pattern is a shim from a kind of late binding that is implemented in the language ("object orientation" a.k.a. dynamic dispatch on the first argument to a function) to one that is not (late binding of classes, constructors returning null, etc.). This isn't the whole picture though, because sometimes late binding isn't even an important part of what we're getting from the Abstract Factory pattern! For many use cases, we could imagine implementing the function that consumes the Abstract Factory using C++ templates or Zig comptime, and our compiler would generate separate subroutines for each factory type and statically determine which one to use at each call site and we would still be doing the Abstract Factory thing.

Another pattern called the Visitor Pattern is similarly a shim from dynamic dispatch on one argument to dynamic dispatch on two arguments. You just really hope you don't need dynamic dispatch on five arguments one day.