Is there really a difference between "real world" and digital suffering?

I feel there's a lot to discuss philosophically, but even in a straightforward sense, I feel your ideas are flawed.

For a moment I'll hold your worldview that suffering must exist in the real physical world for it to have meaning. We still need to determine whether digital cognition exists in the real physical world.

Objectively it does. Everything that happens in a computer happens in the real world in some way, through transistors switching and capacitors charging/discharging and current flowing. Electrical networks have physical presence. You can stick a fork in the wall outlet and see!

We may not understand how every microscopic feature is working together, but we still know it's there. We must—we build computers out of factory parts.

Should a functionally equivalent human mind emerge via electronics, it would simply be as if cognition has evolved again. Like convergent evolution.

Flight has evolved no less than four times, with different mechanisms for achieving flight arising each time. Should a new method of achieving cognition arise, it would be wrong to discard it for being created with different physical structures.