I agree, adaptive thinking is a pest and without a minimum thinking budget especially Claude for me currently defaults to not think at all even on max effort.

Sequential-thinking was really a step in the right direction, and works almost exactly how you've described, though when it was popular before the reasoning models and even now when I tried it recently I have never once see it use its branching feature and it tends also to have the RLHF urge to answer something "helpful" quickly instead.