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Notes -
There's already been talk further up in the thread about all the things that feminists are misguided about regarding the traditional societies they would call patriarchal. On that topic I would say that I too happen to disagree with the idea that masculinity was "valued more" in the past, rather masculinity and femininity were both respected in their own distinct way, and men and women had their own corresponding and complementary forms of power and influence.
However, another very big part of the reason why feminists can come to the conclusion that societies were "oppressive" towards women is because of some very extreme selectivity on their part. They hyper-focus on any perceived male privileges and ignore the very real female privileges and male responsibilities that existed, obscuring the tradeoffs inherent in traditional gender roles. In the societies that feminists claim fit their ideas of "patriarchy", there's plenty of commonly found social norms and structures that contradict the "gendered oppression of women" hypothesis, but are conveniently left out from the definition of patriarchy.
These elements of traditional societies that feminists ignore (e.g. their protectiveness towards women and tendency to assign men responsibility for ensuring female wellbeing) are massively important parts of their social organisation, and I strongly suspect that the exclusion of these inconvenient elements from their definition of "patriarchy" is deliberately done so that the definition fits the preordained framework that feminists already have in mind. When confronted about it, they might occasionally acknowledge the existence of these female privileges and male responsibilities, but then will subsequently attempt to rationalise it away with baroque, unintuitive and unfalsifiable "benevolent sexism"-type word games which paint attitudes and norms that favour women as merely being side effects of patriarchy so as to maintain the idea that the foundational elements of patriarchy are that of male power and privilege. Again, their ideology and beliefs inform their definitions.
As you have already noted, the feminist definition of patriarchy isn't separable from their moral judgements surrounding it - all these moral judgements are baked straight into the DNA of feminist theory. Oppression of women is fundamental to the feminist conceptualisation of gender relations, and all of their definitions and theory bend to accommodate this idea as much as possible through misconceptions, half-truths and some very skewed and selective framing.
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