>I think the main hesitancy is due to rampant anthropomorphism. These models cannot reason, they pattern match language tokens and generate emergent behaviour as a result

This is rampant human chauvinism. There's absolutely no empirical basis for the statement that these models "cannot reason", it's just pseudoscientific woo thrown around by people who want to feel that humans are somehow special. By pretty much every empirical measure of "reasoning" or intelligence we have, SOTA LLMs are better at it than the average human.