Why do people keep fine-tuning on summarized/censored SOTA CoT traces?

The author questions the practice of fine-tuning models on summarized or censored SOTA CoT traces. They observe a belief that distillation can magically improve output quality beyond the base model's capabilities. Specifically, the author finds Fable fine-tunes perplexing, as they seem to overlook that Anthropic's reasoning traces differ significantly from the model's actual chain of thought, likely leading to degraded results.