I'm probably not qualified to say this, but just about every example of consciousness in bees and flies that they described could just as easily be explained if they were automatons.
The opposite, cognitive consciousness without qualia - a.k.a the philosophical zombie - or a computer which can argue the existence of it's thoughts without feeling them is, I gather, a more controversial state of being.
What I find interesting is that in separating the two 'consciousness's, the former ends up taking almost all of the importance and the latter none - anything which can be externally measured ends up in the first category (which is a computable logic process), which leaves very little of utilitarian/evolutionary/algorithmic importance in the second. However, in much discourse about consciousness the latter takes a disproportionate role (i.e fear of losing your unmeasurable consciousness when teleporting, etc, though the cognitive consciousness, being by definition a logical and measurable process is theoretically preserved)"
In this case although the article, to get quick views, appeals to our love for the mystical attributes of the 'conscious exprience phenomenon', the paper actually studies the (in my opinion much more) interesting empirical characterisation of the level of cognitive consciousness in insect 'brains' - i.e., how elaborately their software models its own processes.
"Consciousness" is something that we experience, but it's not required to explain anything at all that's observed.