[vidarh]

I think you're overestimating the thinking here. I ask this question very often, and the persons I ask if of practically never answer.

I ask it to highlight that most people have no clear answer to what we mean by reasoning. It's a notoriously hard term to define with an precision, and even harder to define by precision in a way that would exclude LLM's, which is usually what the people I ask it of want to do.

I don't think your steelman version really "works" for that purpose because the immediate response would be that it makes "reasoning" largely irrelevant if you define the term that restrictively.