A patient person can solve e.g. technological issues others with less patience cannot. A person with a lot of patience can also endure more abuse before taking countermeasures — this can be both good and bad for them, depending on the situation.
The cool thing about the virtue of patience is that given enough experience patient people can decide with whom or what to be patient with, so if they smell abuse they can cut it short.
The opposite isn't true of impatient people. If they encounter a situation where a little bit of patience would have given them a prefered outcome they cannot just "decide" to be patient. Being impatient means just that: you can't regulate your emotions even if it would be preferential for you if you did.
I have personally tons of patience, more than most people I know personally and professionally, and its one of the best assets to have in the toolbox. Why shouldn't it be a virtue? Even if we decide not, who actually cares about labeling. Life is simply better, reaching long term goals is much easier, one is more content if not outright happier (or happiness level overall is higher).
Reading the abstract of the paper, it doesn't mention virtue once. Unfortunately the paper is paywalled:
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/01461672241284028
It does say it's investigating:
"patience as a targeted form of emotion regulation"
Emotion regulation sure sounds like what a layman might describe as a virtue to me.
Err, do you mean the opposite? I'm 95% sure you meant the opposite. "Emotional regulation" has well-grounded semantics, assuming you accept having control over emotions. Virtue is the woo-woo word without any clear semantics.
- 'Modern' morality was only invented in the late 1700s. Not millennia ago. Millennia ago was Aristole's Nicomachean Ethics which was pretty much based around virtues. Mill's utilitarianism and Kant's Categorical Imperative were written in the late 1700s
- Quibbling about the meaning of words is basically a waste of your life. Calling words you don't like woo woo is a waste of everyone else's time. pg wrote a good essay on why: https://www.paulgraham.com/philosophy.html