I believe you are making the edge case here, simply because that's where our technology is.

The alternate position is that given a rather larger set of inputs, over a rather larger space, an intelligence could appear to outsiders as being as conscious ans sentient as they are, even though what we're talking about "under the hood" is some simulacrum of sentience, not sentience as we humans experience it.

This is the "if a computer plays chess as well as a human, is the computer really playing chess? Or just mechanically moving things around?"

My point is that with some larger solution space, the question doesn't matter anymore.