It doesn't seem like word salad as such. There's normally a coherent point expressed, it's just obscured by circuitous sentence structures, unusual word choices, "verbing weirding nouns", metaphors, etc. Could be a result of training that rewards novel/surprising language, but it also feels like it could be an artifact of models imperfectly compressing high-level multidimensional reasoning into language that's easy for them to process but cognitively taxing for humans.

Or, maybe they are dumb using smart words to sound smart in RLHF.

They aren’t reasoning though, are they?