These discussions often get derailed into debates about what "thinking" means. If we define thinking as the capacity to produce and evaluate arguments, as the cognitive scientists Sperber and Mercier do, then we can see LLMs are certainly producing arguments, but they're weak at the evaluation.
In some cases, arguments can be formalised, and then evaluating them is a solved problem, as in the examples of using the Lean proofchecker in combination with LLMs to write mathematical proofs.
That suggests a way forward will come from formalising natural language arguments. So LLMs by themselves might be a dead end but in combination with formalisation they could be very powerful. That might not be "thinking" in the sense of the full suite of human abilities that we group with that word but it seems an important component of it.