There’s an argument that communication which is internal is still communication, and that a language of trajectories required for coordination is still linguistic in a meaningful sense. Most of the ways to differentiate thought from language are probably going to end up splitting hairs. It all comes back to Wittgenstein, and it’s arguable whether the POV is useful, but it’s certainly coherent and defensible.
I think this entire thread of discussion would benefit from remembering multimodal models exist. In other words, pictures are worth a thousand words and have their own place in thought. The existence of a way to translate between modalities doesn't make any of them superior overall--they each have their roles to play.
The idea that language is about thought is only referring to the kind of higher level thinking specific to humans. Any animal can catch a tennis ball, but only humans can construct and then execute complex plans of actions.
This line of thought stems mostly from two observations: one, that the vast majority of language you use is your internal monologue; and two, that this internal monologue would have been extremely helpful for the hominids that would have first developed it even while the rest of the population had not developed language (in contrast, if language is about communication, then it's only useful to a hominid if the whole population speaks language, but then it's hard for it to spread initially).