Neologisms are awful, but so are analogies. if I write "I think" its not an analogy, it's a literal truth. I just thunked it. If I write "the AI thinks" then it begs questions. It isn't literal truth, its analogous, its a linguistic normalisation of describing what it did. Did it think? Who knows!
For the LISP amongst us, "thunk" goes all the way back to 1961 and ALGOL 60. And it was a neologistic analogy even then.