Your comment about the generation of emotions does strike me a quite mechanistic and brain-centric. My understanding, and lived experience, has led me to an appreciation that emotion is a kind of psycho-somatic intelligence that steers both our body and cognition according to a broad set of circumstances. This is rooted in a pluralistic conception of self that is aligned with the idea of embodied cognition. Work by Michael Levin, an experimental biologist, indicates we are made of "agential material" - at all scales, from the cell to the person, we are capable of goal-oriented cognition (used in a very broad sense).
As for whether machines can feel, I don't really know. They seem to represent an expression of our cognitivist norm in the way they are made and, given the human tendency to anthropormorphise communicative systems, we easily project our own feelings onto it. My gut feeling is that, once we can give the models an embodied sense of the world, including the ability to physically explore and make spatially-motivated decisions, we might get closer to understanding this. However, once this happens, I suspect that our conceptions of embodied cognition will be challenged by the behaviour of the non-human intellect.
As Levin says, we are notoriously bad at recognising other forms of intelligence, despite the fact that global ecology abounds with examples. Fungal networks are a good example.