I think that concern is valid in general terms, but it’s not clear to me that it applies here.

The goal here seems to be removing low-value output; e.g., sycophancy, prompt restatement, formatting noise, etc., which is different than suppressing useful reasoning. In that case shorter outputs do not necessarily mean worse answers.

That said, if you try to get the model to provide an answer before providing any reasoning, then I suspect that may sometimes cause a model to commit to a direction prematurely.