I'm not an expert but I agree with your statement on the lower reasoning levels.

Lots of models seem to just allow the model to "bloatmax" tokens in order to get bumps at high/max reasoning levels. Many of the max reasoning levels allow models to use up to double or more the tokens the next lowest reasoning level uses. Its basically only useful for people who have no cost or time stipulations on anything.

I think I actually preferred it when we had models that either had reasoning enabled or didn't.