Sure it isn't. It's like taking a 2026 car and decrying all that complexity is necessary to haul cargo down a beaten path.

It's not. Two wheels and a box made out of whatever you have handy that's stiff enough is all you need. Everything else in a modern car is efficiency, safety, appeal to users, and a whole lot of details that only reflect our current economical and technological constraints of building things. 99% of the technical details of a car is about something else than the "primary goal".

Biology, even more so, is complex because of the way it's constructed (lots of tiny, independent, self-replicating machines) and how it adds up to a functioning organism.

You are missing the point. Biology is a kludge over billions of years and evolution is a blind process. It had many constraints that are not necessary for modern machines or systems. e.g. a GPU doesn't have to reproduce. Why didn't you drop yourself to planck scale or string theory scale and say we need all that detail to actually get a functioning AI.

These believes ran rampant in the 1800s. You're almost 200 years late.

That's what I'm saying. Neurons are complex, but most of that is unlikely to be relevant to thinking or consciousness.

I see absolutely no reason to believe human mind cannot be ultimately boiled down to finite number of floats and run on future commodity hardware.