In most cases I would agree.
But unfortunately, most of the places i need to patch, Forge does not have hooks for.
And even if the tables would be turned, me being forge,
considering the request ,
i would decline it, as for most usecases, it would be useless
not to mention the patches are intended to be applied on 3rd party mods as well ...
Sure one could argue, that 3rd party mods should implement an API,
but seeing the state of modpacking scene ( the slowdown that is added by explicitly implementing interoperability), this approach is much more flexible and expedient and API would be just a fallback option for conflicting situations.