You must first clarify if you believe in imaginary souls or any religion. The human brain is a purely physical system as anything else in the universe. LLMs being another physical system that speaks and thinks so much like us, could be conscious.

You are not the only one. I think it's a very vocal minority, who mostly, sadly, seem to equate obsequious flattery with consciousness and sentience (see, e.g. Richard Dawkins).

There's also the problem that to lay people, LLMs are sufficiently advanced as to be indistinguishable from magic. I suspect that colours many of these responses.

if you look at https://github.com/dbreunig/nesformer

It's obvious a LLM can do anything a computer can do.

As an answer to "Why would LLMs exhibit sentience?"

It is because that would mean that no algorithm could exhibit sentience, claiming that would require some causal action that cannot be performed by an algorithm to create sentience. Some people like to point to quantum effects, but that would require the cause of sentience to be pure randomness. That seems even less plausible. Absent of any evidence that human brains are doing something that no algorithm could do, it would be reasonable to assume that sentience could be algorithmically obtained.