Especially as the erroneous conflation of "sentient" and "sapient" has strong science-fiction roots, too. I've seen them often wrongly conflated in science-fic

Especially as the erroneous conflation of "sentient" and "sapient" has strong science-fiction roots, too. I've seen them often wrongly conflated in science-fiction stories, not so much outwith science-fiction. As I have mentioned before, my suspicion is that decades ago some influential science-fiction author or editor made this error, and it stuck.