I mostly agree with you but I always find it a bit funny how we are the only things/beings that seem to be aware of their own (meta)cognition yet I can't actually pop up my hood like a car so to speak to understand what actually goes on. It gets funnier when we generally can't agree what goes on in our heads by just talking about it with each other. I don't suppose the fox thinks about why did it enter the hen house after the meal, what led it to such an act.
More related when I wrote this comment I still can't tell if I engaged my inner monologue and wrote by dictation as it were or if I let my fingers do the thinking and I read back what they wrote.
Discussions about the mind's eye and inner monologue and so on are always fun but most of the time I never get that much out of them other than satisfying curiosity.
As an aside I remember reading somewhere that some speed reading techniques involve not speaking in your mind the words you're reading (forego your inner monologue) and just internalizing their form and their associated meaning that you already know or something like that.
You don't notice it, but that inner voice is only on the surface. It is generated from what's going on deeper. You may not notice it is very good at occupying your attention. Your "real" thoughts are deeper, then we have processes generating speech based on our deeper structures.
Language communication is not a true representation of what you know. It is a messy iterative process when we try to externalize in words what we know. We also end up with people having the same words who don't understand one another.
An instance of that is the often used (at least on reddit) bell curve meme - https://i.imgur.com/cUOiP2d.jpeg
It is not that the person on the right has the same understanding as the one on the left. It is far deeper, but you end up using the same words. The knowledge behind the words is hard to express, when you try you will not end up truly conveying your internal state. The words are iteratively and messily derived from exploring your inner state, with varying success.
For better or worse, language has the attention of the people. We end up with magical tales about "true names", where knowing an entities "true name" gives you full control. Or with magic that is invoked by speaking certain phrases, and the universe obliges. Or with heated discussions about arbitrary definitions when it rarely matters, and when you really shouldn't, because if you get to the inevitably fuzzy edges of the actual concepts behind words you should just switch to other words and metaphors that have the subject you are interested in discussing in the middle instead of at the edge. In reality, our internal models and thinking are hidden in our not that well understood (except in the minute details, those we know a great deal of) neural networks.