Cute idea, but you're never gonna blow your token budget on output. Input tokens are the bottleneck, because the agent's ingesting swathes of skills, directory trees, code files, tool outputs, etc. The output is generally a few hundred lines of code and a bit of natural language explanation.
Good point and it's actually worse than that : the thinking tokens aren't affected by this at all (the model still reasons normally internally). Only the visible output that gets compressed into caveman... and maybe the model actually need more thinking tokens to figure out how to rephrase its answer into caveman style
In single-turn use, yeah, but across dozens of turns there's probably value in optimizing the output.
Btw your point lands just as well without "Cute idea, but" https://odap.knrdd.com/patterns/condescending-reveal