> (consciousness being a cognitive capacity)

I don't think it makes any sense to say that consciousness is a cognitive capacity. Cognition is one of many qualia that compose the experience of consciousness from the inside, but it's not the only one, and I can easily imagine consciousness without cognition at all.

So I don't think it's weird at all to say that LLMs can be good models of some cognitive capacities (particularly the ones embodied in language) but lacks others, and overall lacks consciousness.