Patch is useful to send less over the wire and for rapidly changing documents, also for large documents

Solid went for n3 patches which are adding or deleting items associated with a URI, which is the linked data way

JSON Patch is based on Json paths and trees

Linked Objects is a simpler version that ties values to uris

An important aspect of patch is that the data in a file is not the same as a filename, and can contain many things or concepts. So patching a file is closely coupled to the transport, patching the data is transport agnostic, and therefore, more decentralized.