The problem is that people aren't able to use language consistently and precisely, and are conflating all kinds of human/animal characteristics together.

GPT-4 really does do human-like reasoning. And it's clearly quite general purpose within its limitations.

But it doesn't have many other aspects of humans/animals such as self-direction, high bandwidth senses, a stream of subjective experience, emotions, certain types of adaptivity, etc. It's not alive and it's not a digital person.

But people aren't able to separate all of those different things, so they can't admit that it has any kind of useful intelligence, because for them that means it's a digital person.

Actually it's even dumber, many people jump to assuming that it goes straight to god-like superintelligence if it has any intelligence at all. Which is another reason they can't admit there is any reasoning, because that would mean the end of the world or something.