The initial motivation for this was likely to thwart any competition. Already Anthropic has accused some companies of organized distillation efforts at a massive scale.

Back when I used antigravity, it used to show the reasoning intact - at least for Gemini Pro 3.1, and likely for Claude Opus 4.6 (not 100% certain about it). I have some recollection of stopping the models mid-turn when they started going astray.

As a power user, I find reasoning fascinating to read and genuinely useful at times. Probably not that useful for 80% of their base.