> Picard's closing boils down to, "we don't know if he meets the third

A little piece of in-universe lore for anyone unaware or who had forgotten: At this point in the series, Data's positronic brain is new technology no one understands. His creator is missing/presumed dead, the "positronic" basis isn't how Federation technology works, and apparently so far they hadn't done a whole lot of direct experimentation (hence why the trial is happening). So not knowing if he's conscious is a lot more reasonable a stance than with real-life LLMs where we do know roughly how they work.

Also later in the series we meet a character whose brain was copied into a positronic brain, and does imply that technology is at least capable of consciousness, whether or not it applies in Data's case.