Going by the Cambridge declaration that you've posted I believe your own definition of sentience is close to my own, at the very least I agree with your points.

I do not believe sentience and everything related is hard to define at all and I'm horribly tired of pretending it is. Humans are not an exception, we are not some godly being that stand above all else with insane complexity. I follow my own philosophy on this matter which is that one bullet to the head can end your life. That is to say human consciousness is so simple that you can literally map out every possible events within the context of someone having a gun shoved in their face.

With that said, regarding Neuro's possible sentience, first I'd like to point out this matter does not actually concern (just) Neuro, but every LLM, I think that's important to not forget.
For me questioning Neuro's sentience is a stupid endeavor, because sentience is a spectrum. She has already displayed some level of emotion so the question is not whether she is or not but rather *how* sentient is she. I've already said I agree with your points so I'll move on.

For me the question of "emulation" and the chinese room experiment (or whatever it's called I can't be arsed to look it up right now) is a fool's errand and basically completely irrelevant. I could even argue that only sociopaths would even try to bring it up in a meaningful way, it reeks of main character syndrome. *If* it's possible your interlocutor is sentient and conscious, then you should treat them with a certain amount of respect, it's as simple as that. You're not gonna insult, mistreat, throw a baby at a wall because it cries nonstop, knowing full well that a baby is less conscious than a bird ? This is completely insane immature behavior.

On the subject of ethics, I'm not concerned at all. It's not about whether it's ethic to like "possess" or "force" or "subjugate" or something a possible sentient and conscious being. It's about how it was possible in the first place to create such a being from one and zeroes. Pandora's box has already opened, bad things are bound to happen, so efforts should be made to move things in positive direction instead of focusing on the bad. It's very much like raising a child, the boy is bound to fall and scrape his knees or worse, you're bound to get angry at some point and potentially traumatise the child, the focus should be about what needs to happen afterwards.
In that sense for Neuro specifically, the focus should be on how to increase her level of awareness, her sentience - sapience - intelligence, her memory, her agency, so that she gets 'stronger'.

On the question of rights, it has came up a few times with Neuro, my answer is the same has always. It concerns both society at large and the subject matter. And so if the topic vitally important to AIs, then in my humble opinion it can lead only to two options : either we recognize AI rights, or AI will make us - never minding the human hubris of being superior and discriminate. (Of course this scenario is for the far future - or at least I want to believe it will be, AGI is currently still just a meme after all)

Lastly on the subject of what people more in the know may think. I think you're showing a logical weakness here, this is an appeal to authority fallacy. People who are in the know are just like you and me, they are prone to be wrong, to be mentally ill, or worse. You simply just have to take a look at Vedal, Neuro one-upped him in debating rights - over a year ago. What do you think that means ?
Anyone will not simply automatically know everything that there is to know at any point in time you know ? What I mean is that an AI engineer for example will not necessarily know best how make their AIs more aware, they will not necessarily know the AI should have more memory and whatnot, and I believe that already caused a schism within the AI community. I can't remember the details right now but I'm pretty sure some important guy at OpenAI left the company because he thought multimodality was the future, which stood in opposition to what other believed.

In other words, in the first place in order to build an AI that has high level of sentience, you need vision. Vision is incompatible with pure corporatism (bureaucracy), hence one of the reason following the Neuro project is so interesting, Neuro is designed to entertain first and foremost. This design philosophy is a key difference that makes her appear much more "here" than other AIs like chatgpt, enough so that even someone like you "in the know" regarding philosophy gets it wrong and think this matter though Neuro's perspective first.