I didn't read the whole thing, but the gist seems to be that consciousness is a spectrum (agreed), and that video game NPCs might be significantly higher up on that scale than we think.

Which ... doesn't seem right to me. It's like saying that if I draw a picture of a character, and then roll some dice to decide how they behave, tearing up that picture is tantamount to some sort of ethical or moral wrongdoing.

I do think that how we treat NPCs matter. I've recently switched from calling my mother's dog "The Horrible Hound" to "The Honorable Hound", not because he understand what I'm saying, but because it makes a different in my own mind, and in the minds of others around me - which has been a challenging thing to explain to my kid.