The part about strawberry is just not right. That problem was solved. And I do think it's a stretch to say German speakers think of the entire sentence before speaking it.

LLMs were not designed to count letters[0] since they work with tokens, so whatever trick they are now doing behind the scenes to handle this case, can probably only handle this particular case. I wonder if it's now included in the system prompt. I asked ChatGPT and it said it's now using len(str) and some other python scripts to do the counting, but who knows what's actually happening behind the scenes.

[0] https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.16705