I cannot understand you position. You seem to assume that exactly one of these is true:
1) IQ is a measure of "true" intelligence
or
2) IQ completely fails as a measure and is meaningless
and since 1) is too nebulous to be true then 2) must be true.
I am not an expert on IQ, but if it was highly correlated with being able to recognize and guess patterns from incomplete data it would not be a surprise to me.
Even just the ability to formulate possible solutions to ambiguous problems could credibly have high correlation with IQ.
I am not saying that these are true, I am just wondering why they sound so impossible to you.