Can knowledge of suchness or emptiness be achieved through cessation of conceptualization?
"Thought" is a rather vague concept. When two people say "cessation of conceptualization" they could mean two completely (or partially) different things.

When I wrote that comment and that answer, I did not mean that one has to stop all thinking. My teachers and my books all agree that complete suppression of thinking is not the target state nor the path to the target state. One Lama said: "we're not training to be a rock or a donkey".

Instead, cessation of reification is more like going from "discrete" thinking to "analogue" thinking. Meaning, you no longer have a notion of particulars, everything becomes fluid and somewhat ambiguous but also multidimensional and "quantum". As Dogen said: "Enlightenment is ambiguity".

Something like this (in different words) is described in e.g. "Mahamudra: The Moonlight" by Dakpo Tashi Namgyal (Chapter 3).