Dennett is becoming more and more part of the "old guard". Things are shifting towards other approaches. Of course, popularity doesn't necessarily mean anything, but keep that in mind when referring to him as an authority.
What evidence do you have of this? In fact, the majority of practicing philosophers are actually physicalists (56.5%):
It seems like it'd be the next logical step: if consciousness is simply what (sensory) computations feel like "from the inside", then it stands to reason that other computations can also "feel like" something from the inside, regardless of the substrate they run on, no?