Yes, but it supports the jerk that everything called or associated with AI is bad, so it makes a popular Beehaw post.

a CoT means externally iterating an LLM

Not necessarily. Yes, a chain of thought can be provided externally, for example through user prompting or another source, which can even be another LLM. One of the key observations behind these models commonly referred to as reasoning is that since an external LLM can be used to provide "thoughts", could an LLM provide those steps itself, without depending on external sources?

To do this, it generates "thoughts" around the user's prompt, essentially exploring the space around it and trying different options. These generated steps are added to the context window and are usually much larger that the prompt itself, which is why these models are sometimes referred to as long chain-of-thought models. Some frontends will show a summary of the long CoT, although this is normally not the raw context itself, but rather a version that is summarised and re-formatted.

I think of chain of thought as a self-prompting model
I suspect in the future, chain-of-thought model will run
a smaller tuned/dedicated chain-of-thought submodel just for the chain-of-thought tokens

The point of this is that, most users aren't very good at
prompting, they just don't have the feel for it

Personally I get worse results, way less what I wanted,
when CoT is enabled, I'm very annoyed that now
the "chatgpt classic" model selector just decides to use CoT
whenever it wants, I should be the one to decide that
and I want it off almost all of the time !!