Beyond underappreciated, it's essentially being ignored. As far as what is publicly available anyway. I think the explanation for this partially or wholly lies

Beyond underappreciated, it's essentially being ignored. As far as what is publicly available anyway. I think the explanation for this partially or wholly lies in the goals and values of the people that research these systems vs the goals and values of natural brains. Generally speaking, AI researchers are trying to leverage existing hardware and tooling to demonstrate performance increases on a set of benchmarks. AI founders are trying to apply the research into products to attract investors. Established tech companies are trying to make money. None of these goals and values are anything like what natural brains are trying to do: survive. If AI researchers, founders and tech companies thought artificial consciousness was the fastest path to any of those goals, they'd put resources into that. But they probably think it's an intractable problem, so it gets passed over for things that are likely to have a real payoff in the short term.