People repeating this take in the face of so much overwhelming evidence to the contrary look so ridiculous that at this point, you just have to laugh at them. Yeah, sure, it's not reasoning. That hour-long exchange I just had with it, where it helped me trouble-shoot my totally bespoke DB migration problems step by step, coming up with potential hypotheses, ways of confirming or disconfirming theories, interacting in real time as I gave it new constraints until we collaboratively arrived at a solution -- that was definitely not "reasoning." Why isn't it reasoning? No explanation is ever given. I'm waiting for the moment when someone tells me that it's not "true reasoning" unless it's produced in the Reasoning region of France.
It's barfing up text in a form similar to tens of thousands of database troubleshooting guides in its training and filling in context you've given it in your discussion/text prompt. It has no understanding of what a database is and would happily tell you what to name your databases' child if you told it the database was pregnant or other similar nonsense.
