"let's reason this out" is about gathering all the facts you need, not just noting down random words that are related. The map is not the terrain, words are not facts.
Reducing the distance of each statistical leap improves “performance” since you would avoid failure modes that are specific to the largest statistical leaps, but it doesn’t change the underlying mechanism. Reasoning models still “hallucinate” spectacularly even with “shorter” gaps.
If I ask you what's 2+2, there's a single answer I consider much more likely than others.
Sometimes, words are likely because they are grounded in ideas and facts they represent.
Yes, and other times they are not. I think the failure modes of a statistical model of a communicative model of thought are unintuitive enough without any added layers of anthropomorphization, so there remains some value in pointing it out.