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Air gaps are a pretty cheap insulator (at least as far as sound insulation goes). The concrete walls should provide thermal mass for more stable temperatures indoors.
Take this with a grain of salt or the ramblings of a random person online, but something I heard somewhere is that thermal mass and thermal insulation kind of have opposite methods to come to a similar goal. Thermal insulating materials typically have awful thermal mass and materials with high thermal mass typically have terrible insulating properties.
Air is a very good insulator, but where it fails is fluidic convection. Most lightweight insulating materials are basically trapped air—air that isn’t allowed to flow. That’s why I think they’ll blow insulation into the gaps.
The insulating properties of thermal masses depends on the material. For instance, copper is very dense but makes a terrible thermal insulator. I’m not sure which is a worse insulator: a free-flowing air gap or concrete. Neither is ideal.
(again, from what I'm aware) Dense materials might not be ideal for insulation, but their density makes them pretty good at thermal mass, so their uselessness at insulating would be moot because the end-result is similar enough to insulation regardless of r-value. They store mid-day heat well into the night and they store midnight coolness well into the day. Cob houses have no insulation, but the mass of the walls means that with proper airflow designs, passive heating and cooling is possible. Though it really does depend on the climate of these kinds of buildings to be effective, otherwise insulation is definitely the way to go.