There is a pretty heavy conceptual bias in defining what counts as consciousness, and as these borderline experiments continue it will only become more obvious. Outside of "the West" a much larger circle of reality is defined as conscious. That may include sacred elements of the landscape, celestial bodies, plants etc. The radical psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich held that everything in the universe was suffused with what he called "orgone" energy that tended to pulse and potentially spontaneously organize into more complex forms. By this logic planets and stars are also alive, the universe is not a dead object, even though they don't usually reproduce, they seem to have other features shared with what we conventionally understand is alive and/or conscious. The Indian scientist Jagadish Chandra Bose also didn't draw such a hard line between dead and living matter, much to the chagrin of the UK Royal Society.
We still struggle to understand what happens at the energy threshold of activity in our neurons, and what is coming and going from the dirac ocean. The different behaviors of observed particles suggests that consciousness, or perception, is some kind of loop that can reach down to the atomic level in an experiment and back up to our human scale again. Perhaps these researchers can determine if that brain can "observe" a quantum experiment somehow, I think that'd be pretty interesting.
I honestly wonder how many people that make all these blanket assurances about how various things aren't conscious have ever hung out with some ferns while on something like psilocybin mushrooms, an experience which arguably discards a lot of ordinary perception filters - the very filters that tell you 'no, that plant is not conscious right now' etc etc. How many of these people also tend to say that animals don't have emotions, which is pretty obviously a false claim.