We attribute agency to everything, absolutely. But previously, we understood that it's tongue-in-cheek to some extend. Now we got crazy and do it for real. Like, a lot of people talk about their car as if it's alive, they gave it a name, they talk about it's character and how it's doing something "to spite you" and if it doesn't start in cold weather, they ask it nicely and talk to it. But when you start believing for real that your car is a sentient object that talks to you and gives you information, we always understood that this is the time when you need to be committed to a mental institution.
With chatbots this distinction got lost, and people started behaving as if it's actually sentient. It's not a metaphor anymore. This is a problem, even if it's not the problem.

That's the fun thing: burden of proof isn't on me. You seem to think that if we throw enough numbers at the wall, the resulting mess will become sentient any time now. There is no indication of that. The hypothesis that you operate on seems to be that complexity inevitably leads to not just any emerged phenomenon, but also to a phenomenon that you predicted would emerge. This hypotheses was started exclusively on idea that emerged phenomena exist. We spent significant amount of time running world-wide experiment on it, and the conclusion so far, if we peel the marketing bullshit away, is that if we spend all the computation power in the world on crunching all the data in the world, the autocomplete will get marginally better in some specific cases. And also that humans are idiots and will anthropomorphize anything, but that's a given.
It doesn't mean this emergent leap is impossible, but mainly because you can't really prove the negative. But we're no closer to understanding the phenomenon of agency than we were hundred years ago.

Well that's simple, they're Christians - they think human beings are given souls by Yahweh, and that's where their intelligence comes from. Since LLMs don't have souls, they can't think.