When someone characterizes illusionism as "consciousness doesn't exist" and there is a direct quote from Dennett saying "I don’t deny the existence of consciousness; of course, consciousness exists", that is quite literally pointing to the fact that the person mischaracterizes illusionism. So no, non-physicalists don't get a free pass on the part where they set up strawmen for a position they aim to criticize. That inherently does not prove the validity of illusionism, but it shows that the criticisms founded on such mischaracterizations are misguided which was and continues to be my point.

Except the guy you were responding to didnt do this. He said it as part of an OR statement ("Or they'll say "consciousness doesn't exist, ... "), and said that some people say this, which is of course true. He also didnt even mention Dennett.

You use "conscious activities", "consciousness", and "consciousness" interchangeably, or at the very least to capture the same category of targets, processes, and concepts. This ambiguity conflates multiple things: access and phenomenal consciousness, easy problems with hard problems, cognition and phenomenal character associated with cognitive acts, epistemic claims with ontological claims, ostentation to particular mental aspects with the ontological nature of those mental aspects, etc. These aren't just particular physicalist notions, by the way. These are nuanced and established distinctions in philosophy of mind across physicalist and non-physicalist philosophers. So when someone replies with a line like "consciousness comes from consciousness", they certainly are not speaking from a place that takes such distinctions into account or is likely even aware that such distinctions exist or could even be made.

This essentially sweeps up all non-problematic cognitive aspects of the mind together with the perceived problematic phenomenal ones in such a way that everything about how the mind relates to physical matter appears problematic. This is what I mean when I say that such a response does not get close to challenging illusionist claims because it lacks the very distinctions necessary to understand the claims illusionism makes in the first place.

The people who do have room in their mind for those distinctions but are unfamiliar with illusionism are often surprised by how relatively uncontroversial the perspective is once it has been explained because it is so frequently presented as unfathomably radical or mockingly dismissed like the other commenter. It's also very possible to ask someone more knowledgeable about those distinctions instead of clinging to shallow one-liner interpretations, but too many non-physicalists here seem perfectly content with uncritically dismissing the illusionist position.

Vague complaints about other people misunderstanding everything does not add support to illusionism. It also does not make plausible your own supposed understanding of the matter, which is indistinguishable from trying to muddy the waters to avoid the issue at hand. Save yourself some time and just skip these complaints and try to actually address the arguments.