>They're explicitly defining the hard problem out of existence.
A claim is just an opinion, it's not a 'definition' or 'declaration'. That's absurd hyperbole. If I say personally I don't think the hard problem is an obstacle for physicalism, I'm not defining anything.
Let's see what the author says in his introduction to the paper. "Take this with a grain of salt". Hardly the definitive declaration you're railing against.
Yes, they are.
> The claim is that phenomenal consciousness is fundamentally functional, making the existence of philosophical zombies (entities that behave like conscious beings but lack subjective experience) impossible.
They're explicitly defining the hard problem out of existence.
> I loathe this kind of lazy pejorative attack accusing someone of asserting
Take it easy. Nothing I wrote here is a "pejorative attack", I'm directly addressing what was written by the OP.