I'm never sure whether this indicates "no reasoning present" or you've just hit an odd behaviour in the AI such that its reasoning fails. For example, you present a problem in a way that's dissimilar to the way problems are presented in its training set. That doesn't mean it's not reasoning, just it can only reason correctly in some circumstances.
I'm pretty sure most people building these models would admit they don't operate as human-like intelligences? It's baffling that anyone thinks they are.
But that doesn’t mean they don’t reason.
These LLM models/agents absolutely do not reason in the sense that humans do, so you're quietly redefining the word.
You can say of course decide to call them an "alien kind of intelligence" that "reasons" but you could just as reasonably say that calculators are an "alien" kind of intelligence that "reasons" about math differently than us.
Do you have a RealReasoningBenchmark, perhaps, that can reliably tell apart that fake mass produced token-flavored AI reasoning from the real, organic, 100% natural human reasoning?