I feel like patents are well beyond their utility.

They are really only useful today to protect companies during their enshittification phase. Is enshittification useful to society? Maybe.

Probably tech patents should have been reformed when IBM went around trying to protect its BIOS. Or when Microsoft started pushing its weight around with FAT.

A large company protecting itself against competition is almost definitionally anti productivity.

Some kind of category protection might be useful. Protect only the latest (or maybe latest x) genuinely novel innovation in a category while open sourcing everything prior. Keeps the incentive to innovate, removes patent trolling and reduces enshittification. Will need a strong hand to ensure that people dont just try and create a bunch of new categories.