Yeah, exactly. There's no trick to it at all, unlike the original puzzle.
I also tested OpenAI's offerings a few months back with similarly nonsensical results: https://awful.systems/post/1769506
All-vegetables no duck variant is solved correctly now, but I doubt it is due to improved reasoning as such, I think they may have augmented the training data with some variants of the river crossing. The river crossing is one of the top most known puzzles, and various people have been posting hilarious bot failures with variants of it. So it wouldn't be unexpected that their training data augmentation has river crossing variants.
Of course, there's very many ways in which the puzzle can be modified, and their augmentation would only cover obvious stuff like variation on what items can be left with what items or spots on the boat.