GoF is, in my opinion, about establishing a language to talk about commonly used constructs in languages - especially given it's providence in Christopher Alexander's A Pattern Language.

Referring to it as 'a set of tricks' would suggest to me that you've only given it a cursory glance and assumed that it's just about copying out example blocks of code, or that you've not worked in a wide enough set of languages to realize that every language has commonly used patterns for doing particular things, no matter how expressive the language is. Having a way to discuss the architecture of a piece of software without having to explain every implementation detail because there's already a shorthand refer to various parts of it is invaluable when working on larger projects. Being able to call a block of code as a flywheel is no more a trick than being able to refer to an options pricing equation as a 'modified black-scholes' - the important part is that other person knows from that what you're talking about and so you can get to the important part of the conversation.