It's totally reasonable to compare against LLMs doing chain of thought if it gets comparable performance.
I think this is reasonable if people are actually using LLMs to solve this type of narrow structured task, which they are. The evidence is that every LLM provider has some method of forcing the output to conform to a json schema in their documentation.
can jev play battlefield six for example
Their manifesto: "you only build on top of it if it's trustworthy." - the irony of this while putting out the most misleading, dishonest marketing campaign I've seen in months for their first public appearance doesn't exactly scream "trustworthy" to me.