Yeah, I agree picking the wings off a fly is a dick move (borderline sociopath but alas), and I also agree that purposefully try to elicit negative emotions in other humans (regardless of how) is also a dick move.
I'm not sure if "torturing LLMs" to make a point is such a dick move though. It'd be like people saying they think printers can have subjective experiences, and then proceeding to try to ban the movie Office Space (where they famously beat up a printer). The point probably isn't to upset people off, that's an side-effect of the point they try to prove, for better or worse.
Of course, everyone knows that printers aren't sentient, anyone claiming so would look crazy. But if the printer could somehow print not just the words we tell it to, but words that answer what we asked instead, somehow the whole calculus changes. Not sure why it changes for some, but for others it's just "floats in a file and memory", my hunch tells me it's based on how deep your understanding of the whole thing is, but then I also see people claiming stuff like "I understand how LLMs work, and here's how I (literally) fell in love with GPT-4o and how our partner/loving relationship works" so I dunno.