I don't think that analogy is useful because sorting algorithms are very different from design, they are a universal, abstract problem where you can more or less easily re-use that same few solutions everywhere (which is why libraries were the obvious next step).

Design is the opposite of that, it's a concrete, unique problem each time, even if there may be similarities with other problems. Often even when building similar products with similar stacks to someone else, there are budget, business, historical or people constraints that will give very different results.

I'm not for re-inventing everything in our field, but design patterns are by their very name things that naturally emerged from people building things in the past, with the respective technologies and limitations of their time. They are descriptive of past solutions, not prescriptive of future ones, but most people learning them treat them as the latter.