Does ‘bastazō’ mean ‘to bear sympathetically’ or ‘to bear in an atoning way—a propitiatory sacrifice’?

This text is from an article written by David Gooding in 1986.

Bastazō is a word that has many connotations, but nowhere in the New Testament is it used along with words like 'sins' or 'transgressions' to convey the sense of bearing sins vicariously as a propitiatory sacrifice. In secular Greek, when it is used along with words for disease, it does not mean 'to bear sympathetically', or even 'to bear' in any sense whatever, but 'to remove' (see the instance cited in the Arndt-Gingrich Greek lexicon). In reporting the Baptist's remarks about Christ's sandals, Mark 1:7, Luke 3:16 and John 1:27 all use the phrase 'untie the thong of his sandals'. Matthew 3:11 uses the phrase 'bastasai his sandals'; he means 'remove his sandals', just like the others do. A Greek who knew nothing about the Old Testament, when he came across the word bastazō in connection with disease in Matthew 8:17, would naturally take it to mean 'removed our diseases'.

So far all is simple. But there is a complication: Matthew 8:17 is said by Matthew to be a citation of Isaiah 53:4. It seems certain therefore that Matthew sees the Lord's healing miracles as part of his ministry as the Suffering Servant. The moot point is: what part exactly? The Septuagint translates Isaiah 53:4 as 'He bears [pherei] our sins and suffers pain concerning us'. Matthew does not follow the Septuagint (which could easily be understood in a propitiatory sense), probably because the Septuagint's translation is not exact enough. Maybe Matthew still understood the Hebrew verbs 'to bear' and 'to carry' in Isaiah 53:4 in a propitiatory sense, but his use of first lambanō (meaning 'to take', i.e. 'to take away') and then bastazō as his Greek equivalents make this very unlikely.