The ocean patch is hundreds of thousands of square kilometers, think 2x the size of Texas and the plastics are dispersed through the top 100m of the water column. This is an extremely thin 'cloud' of small plastic bits, not a floating island of plastic bottles.

The problem with any collection-based solution such as this or the one being discussed in the article, is that the scale of the infrastructure and associated transport, maintenance, and support systems, required to actually collect a meaningful amount of waste would be far more damaging to the environment then the plastic waste itself, and would very likely introduce more waste and pollution into the environment.

Ignoring the cost of building a giant floating recycling facility and providing it with amenities required to have people work/live on it, there's the difficulty of actually keeping it intact in violent ocean Typhoons.

yes. and, if that's not practical maybe a specialized plastic compacting ship the size of an oil tanker?

it could make large bundles/cubes of plastic material which could then be transported back to land by other ships.