What I'm seeing here, reading this thread, is that "intelligence" isn't a thing.
"Thing" in terms of a quantifiable that you can measure with tools and reason about, reproducibly. Everyone's got some idea what it is, so you get lots of different angles, but no one has an Intelligence Ruler we can hold up to a text output and say, yep, this one's got an INT of 14.
Seems to be the crux of the disagreement.
It's deceptively undefined I'd say. People can argue under the impression that everyone shares their idea of what "intelligence" means, before realizing that their counterpart actually has an entirely different idea of what it means.
I'm leaning towards there being a divide between those who feel "intelligence" is entirely separate from "sentience" and those who feel that one implies the other.