When I evaluate this statement, my brain raises a type error.
Intelligence is a lot of things -- compression among them, and yes possibly an RL-based AI would use an actor-critic approach for evaluating its actions, but I doubt that at all maps onto the human activity we call "critical thinking."
To me, critical thinking involves stuff like questioning assumptions, logical reasoning, weighing whatever I'm thinking about against my experience with similar situations previously, yada yada, all stuff that are symptoms of intelligence but I am not at all sure are the actual embodiment there of.
I really don't see that critical thinking is at all required for a raw optimization process. The problem they are trying to solve is what happens when that optimization process isn't aligned with human flourishing?
Think about it another way. Covid was a dumb optimization process, only evolutionarily-guided, and it still hit us pretty hard!
Edit: Another interesting way I just thought about this that might support your idea more is, of course critical thinking is the sort of thing that a "better" brain would do automatically, it would just be thinking. Of course, we can't know that it's thinking "good" things--we can't even know if other humans are! So it's probably a good idea to figure out how to influence that sort of thing before making something with regular thinking which is equivalent to or superior to our critical thinking.