I think this is a known phenomenon: even in non-reasoning models, adding useless/filler tokens before an answer improves task performance. The model is doing some computation during the filler. See: https://arxiv.org/html/2404.15758v1
(This is I think where people parroting out "stochastic parrot" are stuck even today - not realizing that "predicting next tokens" is hiding arbitrary computation underneath, with token stream acting as input and clock signal...)