To have a sufficiently well-founded opinion to call people who disagree with you "simpletons," I'd argue that you indeed should have a defensible idea of what's conscious and what's not. Of course nothing is stopping anyone from being an asshole on the Internet so no, you don't "need" to do anything at all.

You have to prove your understanding of consciousness to be certain that LLMs are not conscious. It’s your certainty that I suspect most are reacting to here.