Without special effort, a model's reasoning layer doesn't have access to its own weights or activations anymore than we have access to what's going on with our own neurons.

That's what I mean. Maybe the "special effort" is a 'read your own weights' tool. Or maybe it emerges naturally in CoT. The big labs aren't sharing their chain of thought with us and RL post training techniques are not exactly shared publicly. At the same time, post training is basically the thing that is driving most model improvements nowadays.