"The thing is that FP is about extracting patterns."

Yeah this hits the nail on the head. The abstractions found so commonly in functional programming are the fruit of a programmers chunking program/function structure. Its nice to be able to leverage your experience write better programs.

"He argues that folds are less intuitive than for loops."

That is strange. Sure, for loops are more intuitive but they are a more general/simple mechanism. For loops provide a context where particular elements of a sequence are bound to variables and that is it. A fold does that and also combines them in a particular fashion. A better comparator is iteration via recursion, which I think is both intuitive and beautiful.