It's a bit more subtle though, if I understand correctly this only works for parallelizable problems. Which makes intuitive sense since the model cannot pass information along with each dot. So in that sense COT can be seen as some form of sampling, which also tracks with findings that COT doesn't boost the "raw intelligence" but rather uncovers latent intelligence, converting pass@k to maj@k. Antirez touches upon this in [1].
On the other hand, I think problems with serial dependencies require "real" COT since the model needs to track the results of subproblems. There's also some studies which show a meta-structure to the COT itself though, e.g. if you look at DeepSeek there are clear patterns of backtracking and such that are slightly more advanced than naive repeated samplings. https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.19143
