True, but even with native audio-token models you still need to split the model’s output channels. Reasoning/internal tokens shouldn't go into the audio stream only user-facing content should be emitted as audio. The principle is the same, whether the last step is TTS or audio token generation.

There's an assumption there that the audio stream contains an equivalent of the <think>/</think> tokens. Every reason to think it should, but without seeing the tokeniser config it's a bit of a guess.