What words mean is always a matter of definition. It is also usually (maybe even always and necessarily) vague. Humans are inclined to anthropomorphize and ascribe agency to pretty much everything. So my fairly confident prediction is that the definitions will end up so that "language models can have opinions". Some specific language models, for better or worse, may then be found not to have opinions.

Some people seem to be hinting at some "deeper" mystery underlying (human?) condition, which they're trying to capture with concepts, leading to debates about the meaning of words such as "consciousness". That word is commonly agreed to mean something "magic". One may think it a deep mystery and highly interesting. One may also think that it's a concept like "immortal soul", that empiricists will eventually abandon. Both viewpoints seem reasonable to me.

What I object to is insisting on definitions for much more mundane concepts, such as "opinion", that also must be somehow "magic", just because they also have something to do with human cognition. When I say "my friend X is of the opinion that we should do Y", nobody starts to ponder the potentially deeply mysterious consciousness of X. That's because it's besides the point.