These aliases for Axes.patch and Figure.patch were intended as deprecated 8 years ago in 40f24d5. See https://github.com/matplotlib/matplotlib/blob/master/lib/matplotlib/figure.py#L335 and https://github.com/matplotlib/matplotlib/blob/master/lib/matplotlib/axes/_base.py#L1083.

They should be replaced by deprecation-raising properties, and examples updated appropriately.