My anecdotal experience with how people treat Alexa devices does not inspire confidence in me with regards to this. I can't even convince my wife not to gender it when referring to it.
It’s not limited to AI or LLMs - theory of mind is a powerful explanatory tool that helps us navigate a complex world, and we misapply it all the time.
If you can take pity on the final, dented avocado at the shops because it looks "sad", you will for sure end up calling Alexa 'she'. Avocados can't be sad, but they can look sad /to humans/, and a machine can't really have a gender or be polite in the human sense, but it can definitely sound like a polite lady.
I think humans will just fundamentally relate to anything they perceive socially as another human, even if we know full well they aren't human. Probably it's a lot less work for a human brain, than it is to try to engage with the true essence of being an avocado or an Alexa.
If we anthropomorphic animals and even vegetables regularly, what happens when something appears to talk back to us intelligently? I don't think these mechanisms are nearly as distinct as you make them out to be.
Obviously making an object mimick human traits makes it a lot easier to anthropomorphize. Like if you put a little cowboy hat on a pear. But you wouldn't say that somebody doesn't "understand that fruits aren't human" if they assign human traits to them. Making a machine that talks back at us in a seemingly intelligent way is a much more intensely human trait for it to have. It's not down to our intellectual understanding of the thing, but how our brains decode our (social) world.
So the anthropomorphizing happens regardless of the level of technical understanding. We both know it's just a pear, but it's also a cowboy now.
Of course there's a level of playfulness involved with all of this too. It's kinda fun to backsass your GPS instructions, or tell Alexa she's being nosy, or ask your dog what he thinks of the presidential debate. But that's not the same as foolishly overestimating the political acumen of the dog, or the nature of Alexa's intelligence.
Most people don't act like things have feeling all the time, or to the same level as a living being might have feelings, but many people do it to a degree. Given that much of how we feel is immediate (and thus not reasoned), subconscious, and sometimes Pavlovian, I don't think it's a stretch to think that even acting like an inanimate object has feelings or human traits regularly might lead towards subconscious feelings about it that are not entirely rational or immediately understood by the person.
For a slightly different argument, consider why it's generally considered good advice not to name the animals meant for slaughter. Or how people treat cars or large pieces of equipment that aren't always reliable (are "temperamental"), or that are tightly linked to safety and livelihood, such as boats.
We are social animals. We bond to others easily by our nature, because it's beneficial for survival. I think we do it so easily that it extends towards animals, often to good effect, but sometimes even to inanimate objects that have a lot of significance. In the past this seems to even have been extended to weapons and armor, given the number of named items in history.