"What he's saying is that it seems rather implausible that we'd skip all the stages of development and jump straight to consciousness which is a reasonable position to hold."

i don't see any reason to think that you need to go through those particular steps, they seem unneccessary and egregious. The author doesn't know what consciousness is at all so they can only assume one way to do it. If that's their point it could've been said in one sentence and adds nothing to the discussion.

"Nowhere is he saying he would just never believe it no matter what either." he didn't give a reasonable way to falsify the claim which ultimately amounts to saying "nah I just don't think so"

"Why wouldn't anyone ever do the steps of actually creating a proper feedback loop which would have some basis for consciousness?" They would, what you said is vastly more reasonable than what the author wrote, but even then, you wouldn't know if you ended up with something conscious or not. None of the steps listed actually require subjective experience.

basically the author added nothing to the conversation, they went "i don't really know what consciousness is but whatever it is llm's aren't it because they're different from me and I'm the only thing I know is conscious."

and in fact that's an adequate summary of the article, if they wanted to make a good one they'd first need to define consciousness and continue using that definition, since they didn't define it they're free to say whatever they want and it's essentially meaningless