Commenting a bit late since I had this tab open for a while, but I find this discussion interesting. Even more magical than consciousness itself, are people denying that there even is a hard problem of consciousness to begin with (if you assume the standard model) ;) You started with asking if consciousness is really that magical and finished with basically admitting that we don't have an answer for how it works yet.

The hard problem of consciousness is not just about the why, it's also about the how. That's exactly the magical part: how subjective, non-physical experiences (supposedly) come from physical interactions. Brushing it off as "evolution" is not sufficient to explain the how.