Like the response from the UltraSane: my thinking is and always was 100% made of internal language-based chain of thought ("imaginary talking to myself"), with some amount of introspection / meta reasoning when problem is particularly hard. This article indeed reads to me a bit like someone proposing a physical storage medium inspired by those pictures of little squares traditionally used as "save" icon, without realizing that this digital representation was in the first place based on an existing real world thing.
Anyway, a surprising related observation is that rubber ducking by describing the problem to quiet listener still often helps me, which suggests that internal chain of thought makes intuitive shortcuts that sometimes are counter productive, while talking to another person creates subconscious pressure to make the thoughts fully complete.