Yeah this view that it's all pattern matching isn't too helpful. I find it more helpful to consider mathematics the art of generalization.
Discrete math is frequently about things with very little structure (e.g. graph theory, where you basically just have any binary relation), so inevitably ends up trying to prove things that are way too general. The flipside is that those theorems do tend to crop up everywhere.
Discrete math is frequently about things with very little structure (e.g. graph theory, where you basically just have any binary relation), so inevitably ends up trying to prove things that are way too general. The flipside is that those theorems do tend to crop up everywhere.