The meta issue here is that mostly the online debate on this is a bit lazy and hand wavy. I'm not really up to speed with most of that literature so I'm not not that qualified to add to it. But I know enough to recognize when others aren't either.
For a proper debate, you'd want people that are expressing views that are at least grounded in the existing views or counter them in a way that holds up to scrutiny. This article doesn't do that.
As you said even just outlining what particular notion of consciousness the author subscribes to would be helpful. Which of course he doesn't and makes this article a bit of a sand castle based on a very loose foundation. There's a whole lot of "if this is true and if that analogy holds then this also needs to be true" that you could easily challenge. That all makes the article a bit of a nothing burger in terms of conclusions.
I happen to agree with the conclusion that AIs are not conscious. Yet. They could be. I don't see why not.