For example the purpose of anesthesia the goal can be broken down into several sub-components that you need to turn off without ever invoking the concept of consciousness: wakefulness, memory-formation, sensory input (pain).
Similarly consciousness seems to be a grab-bag of fuzzy properties that we ascribe to humans and then by letting five be even we also allow a few other species to roughly match (some) of those properties if we squint. And since humans and other, clearly somewhat simpler, species are clearly conscious then we go on and declare it's a really difficult thing to understand how ever-simpler things can't be conscious. It's just the paradox of the heap.
This doesn't mean consciousness is magical. It's just a very poorly defined and overloaded concept almost bordering on useless in the general case. It may feel like magic because we built this thought-edifice that twists to escape our grasp. But to me that seems more like a philosophical mirror cabinet that distracts from looking at the actual problem.
If you want to ask whether something is conscious you first need to come up with a rigorous testable definition or break it down into smaller components which you can detach from the overloaded concept of consciousness.