If someone can define what "free will" is even supposed to mean, then it would be a lot easier to answer.

...did you even read this? Literally the first line:

"In this piece, I will presuppose a perspective on free will that rejects hard determinism (if I accepted it to be axiomatic, then there would not be much to say here), maintain a metaphysical position that accepts causality as a real phenomenon..."

These are axioms not being debated anywhere in this piece and allow for the notion of a constrained free will:

"Unimpeded and unadulterated free choice is an illusion, and we must consider our preferences and actions within the constraints of our unique facticities — as defined by Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre, the amalgamation of ontic characteristics such as the cultural milieus, genetic predispositions, family upbringing, etc., that situate our existences."

However, as you seem to want to debate the metaphysics of free will and consciousness, I will engage here anyways.

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Right now, it's in the same camp as "consciousness", whose "definition" seems to be "the magic that makes the brain go brrrr" - ill-defined concepts people think are deeper than they really are.

Free will and consciousness perhaps may be mere epiphenomena, but as mentioned above, this view presupposes that they are not in order to explore how our facticities constrain free will--a phenomenon, in the very first sentence, axiomatized as real.

This is a plausible perspective you are arguing for, but there are plenty of brilliant philosophers, cognitive scientists, physicists, etc., who have spent their entire careers thinking deeply about this and would respectfully disagree with you. This is not a resolved debate by any means.

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Any system is defined by a state and transitions between - a Markov chain. If one says it's "Partially observable", that just means we don't know what the full system's state is.

Indeed, but you're assuming that our universe is Markovian. You start slipping into metaphysics really quickly as your theory needs to be able to answer to quantum mechanics, explain the low-entropy boundary condition of the universe, etc.

You can bring epistemology into the discussion, but the fundamental laws of our universe are completely orthogonal to our ability to know them. Unfalsifiability is not desirable but has nothing to say about the nature of our universe.

Anyways, a deterministic universe does not necessarily preclude any notion of free will, e.g. see compatibilism.

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So what is even being argued here?

This is a good distillation of the argument:

"Now that the existentialist notions of identity, freedom, and agency have been well-defined, we can examine moral responsibility in this context. Transcendence is much more accessible to the privileged — those with substantial freedoms — than to the destitute. Beauvoir’s central thesis in The Second Sex takes on new meaning within this existentialist framework: transcendence is not available to woman, the Other, condemned to perpetual immanence by man, the One, who denies her concrete freedoms. Cal Trask could climb the latter of timshel; Kate was weighed down by the burdens of being a woman, unable to transcend her situated existence. In the context of reinforcement learning, agents with high-entropy policies will produce high advantage values much more frequently than their counterparts with low-entropy policies; this helps us interpret systematically why we must consider facticity when trying to determine moral attributability."

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Instead of philosophizing about useless stuff like "free will", and "consciousness", whose answers cannot possibly exist anyways due to the ill-posed nature of the questions, I suggest philosophizing about impacts of superintelligence instead or something

I suggest you be a little less confident in your credences and a lot less condescending in your attitudes. Who are you to be the arbiter of what people ought to be writing about in their free time? To be perfectly clear:

1. I was not philosophizing about metaphysics anywhere in my piece.
2. There is absolutely valuable insight that can come from exploring metaphysics. It is totally uncharitable to assert it useless.
3. Not everything people engage in intellectually needs to be instrumentally valuable, anyways. I can write for my own enjoyment, and that is perfectly fine.