Somehow ideas of consciousness makes us go absolutely batty as opposed to ideas of renal function or ideas of meiosis.

All our evidence is consistent with consciousness requiring a very elaborate and self-referential computational structure: we can intervene on consciousness with drugs, oxygen deprivation, psychoactive substances, brain damage, etc. etc.

The idea that consciousness is not an emergent property that creates a regularity where none was, but that the individual components have some sort of consciousness-primitives, is hard to disprove but also totally without evidence. As such, like all mystical ideas, it should be summarily rejected as implausible (almost every idea we can imagine but which isn't testable right now is nonetheless wrong: the set of possibilities is vastly larger than the set of actualities).

The further idea that the problem is hard is also rather batty (no thank you, Chalmers). The perceived difficulty is due mostly, I think, due to even philosophers' poorly-developed skill at jumping between third-person and first-person views.

Once you bail on the first-person account and commit to solving everything in the third person, the problem becomes magically easy: when you have a large representational capacity and it includes the ability to represent yourself, you have at least the potential for the kind of outwardly observable features we ascribe to consciousness. Then the question is a pragmatic one: is this, in fact, how it works? Do the appropriate internal computations and flows of information take place to match our subjective first-person feelings? We don't know for certain, but the problem isn't "hard" in any way except that every deep question about super-complex systems is hard. You certainly don't need to make the consciousness bit an intrinsic property of some or all parts of the universe.

If you think that some of the consequences of consciousness can be pretty weird--for instance, if it's an algorithm, you could write down a particular state and have a frozen snapshot of an instant of conscious experience--well, yeah. People who take mind-altering drugs report pretty weird stuff too. Heck, sleep is weird, dreaming is weird. We don't conclude anything deep from this except that the brain is complicated and our intuitions about the detailed mechanism of action is rubbish. Indeed, we have innumerable examples of illusions that are exactly our brains compensating for implementation limitations to give us a more workable representation of the outside world at the expense of a less faithful accounting for how our own processes work. (Saccade blindness, for instance. It is hilarious how this works--the brain is predicting, inventing, and retrodicting ("I saw this later, so I will also tell you that it must have been like this earlier because that makes sense") in order to leave us with the workable smooth representation of the visual scene instead of having a choppy difficult-to-use representation available to the rest of the brain.)

So, anyway. Panpsychism's popularity seems to me to mostly be a failure of imagination by philosophers and others about how stupendously complex brains are, and how ill-suited evolutionary pressures were to kill those of us without great introspection into the detailed workings of the brain.