>I wouldn't be able to simply look at some text and give you an accurate word count
Actually this ability is at very core of human brain. Yet we humans traded most of it for the ability to speak better. Nevertheless, brain can still read very fast as well as count objects/words really fast, but as you've never really trained, this part of the brain is optimised a lot to do other stuff. Try scanning the texts diagonally, and try to come up with a random word count and what this text is meaning. On the first tries you will be making a lot of errors, but eventually, just 100 hours of training (much less when you are kid) and you will be able to scan the texts in seconds and extract the meaning and the word count very accurately. This is a real technique people use for reading fast.
The thing is – the best and most useful ability of human brain is to adapt, from the very moment it adapted to the harsh reality of being expelled from trees and living on the ground – that's how language was created in the first place, as a result of this adaptation. LLM's can't adapt today, nor doesn't need to adapt, so their mental abilities will never come close to the brain which was adapting for millions of years. Something which is not adapting will become obsolete and come to it's end, this is a fundamental law.