I am suspecting that you are using a definition of "qualia" that has ontological commitments built in. The term really doesn't have those and you need to get your terms straight. If you want to talk about those ontological commitment use words that directly access them.
I maybe too generous in assuming that you mean what "qualia" means. The example of insisting that people are blindsighted is what I understand for someone that doesn't believe in qualia. The version that treats qualia as "explanations" of how things can work as they do utilise a sense of the word that it does not have.
It feels like you mean"qualia" as a bit of ontology that is not material which would explain why you see materialism as it's antonym. What you really ought to use are words like "metaphysical organ" or "soul" or "mental" as ontolgocial primitive in contrast to materia. Those words have a lot worse ring because claims involving them tend to be somewhat ridicilous.
There might be an interesting argument of the lines of "materialism doesn't explain experience so we need to entertain the possibility of non-physical bits into our ontology". "qualia" refer to the "experience is a thing that happens" part but not to the hypothetical ontology extension. Like gravity anomalies might found assumptions into the existence of dark matter there migth be a danger of taking "dark matter" to be a synonym or shorthand for the gravity anomalies. But conceptually these are separate and there are physicist that think that discovering better gravitation laws addresses the anomalies without supposing new categories of substance (ie dark matterless theories are seen as viable).
It might be interesting to try to steelman the soul question. For example in a morph environment there might be a question of which actors are NPC and which are PC. And it's true there that on a game world level PCs and NPCs are similar functionning. But PCs can go "afk" and they require wetware to sit in front of a keyboard. Somebody that thought that the game world is the place where the cognitive machinery lies might think that there is no reason to posit that keyboards even exit and esoteric "biological" components would be explanationarily needless for understanding what happens in the game world. In particular examining part of the game code/world that is involved in netcode one might quess tht the cognition lies inside that bit of code instead of locating outside it.
And in general for video games the perception for the game world is primary to the existence of the game world itself. You infer the existence of a 3d world because of what flashes on your screen and because 3d terminology is an effective way to talk about different screen states. And in the case of games we know the worlds are fictious they can only upkeep an apperance and keeping up that appearance uses up cpu cycles. If somebody would try to get inductive on what is shown on the screen they could get a very different concpetion of what world forces there are present than one that assumes that there is a source code that dictates what happens.
In a conception that is popoular in these days it's easy to tell a story where the effective phenomena that we see are representative of the mechanisms that generate our expereiences. We think we can see the workings of the world, we think we have access to the source code. But if we could hit a soft or hard wall on figuring out the source code of a video game from the inductive screen patterns how could we tell whether we have hit such a wall in the real world?
It might be that explainining things like healthbars are very unnaturally explained in a theory that tries to treat the 3d game world as the actually existing layer of existence. Someone that has a lot of skill that is built on a 3d conception of the world might be tempted to not even try to explain healthbars and rather try to argue that they don't exist. But it's still a different thing to note that healthbars exist than to theorise background entities that might be responcible for them.
One trap that we must be wary of is adopting beliefs because they are popular among people who strive to think critically or scientifically, as opposed to being the result of critical or scientific thinking. One good example of this is RationalWiki which purports to report the political beliefs which all Rational(TM) people should hold. Similarly, I believe that most people who believe in materialism do so on the basis of extremely poor reasons and without knowledge of some of the stronger arguments for qualia existing. Maybe we should ultimately support materialism, but I get the impression that many people jump to this conclusion too quickly. Here are some points I believe people should consider first
(I know someone else in the rationality community wrote a post arguing for consciousness recently and I was meaning to read it, but I lost the link before I had a chance)
Failure to bite the bullet argument
If qualia don't exist, why is anything that you experience good or bad? In this case, things like pleasure, pain and meaning are nothing more than ways that particles can combine. But if this is the case, why are these combinations special or more important than other combinations? Why should we try to make certain combinations happen and certain combinations not?
It's fairly common to deny the existence of the objectively good or bad, but denying the existence of the subjectively good or bad is a much stronger claim. But everyone acts like this matters and so it appears somewhat hypocritical. And there is an argument that we should continue to act normally on the basis of meta-theoretic uncertainty, but no-one makes that argument.
Pascal's Wager Argument
This last point is actually a pretty strong argument for believing in qualia. If they don't exist, nothing matters, but if they do exist then we benefit from acting as though they do exist. Therefore, we should assume the later.
Expected Evidence Argument
Claiming the existence of qualia is often seen as anti-scientific, some people would even go as far to say that they don't see much difference between claiming the existence of ghosts or qualia. One key difference is that if ghosts existed we would expect objective evidence of them, even if the experiments would be hard to run. For example, we would expect a greater rate of howling in houses where someone was murdered. Even if they could only interact with us psychically, we would expect a higher rate of mental illness in these houses, even if the person living there had no idea of the past. Since if ghosts existed we would expect the existence of objective evidence, the lack of any such evidence counts against them.
On the other hand, it's not so clear that we should expect any objective evidence of subjective experience. Arguably, the only evidence we should expect of subjective experience is direct, subjective evidence. So the absence of objective evidence provides no Bayesian evidence against the existence of qualia.
Initial Foundations Argument
How should we come to understand the world? It seems like we might want to first pick a class of phenomena to be the foundation and that this should be whatever we are most certain of existing. We will then need to decide on the best way of knowing about that phenomenon and then choose a way of figuring out what other kinds of things might exist in the universe.
So what should our initial foundations be? One option is the external physical world, while the other is subjective experience. The later makes more sense to me as it describes why we believe in an external world. It isn't that we just assume it a priori, but instead that we notice patterns in our subjective experience and then theorise that there might be some object that exists independently of our experience causing these regularities. On the other hand, subjective experience makes much more sense to assume a priori and hence more sense as an initial foundation. Indeed, we could even say that this approach is truer to the scientific method since we even subject our belief in the existence of the external world to an empirical test. In other words, objective experience needs to be justified in terms of subjective experience and not the other way round.
Transcendence Argument
Arguably the nature of an atom (or whatever elementary particle we choose) transcends its mere mathematical description. Firstly, the claim that "THIS IS ALL THAT THERE IS TO IT" seems like a strong claim and one which we can never know for certain. Surely, it is much more reasonable to maintain that there is at least the possibility of there being something in its nature beyond this. Indeed, if there were not, this would seem to imply that a perfect simulation of an atom is an atom and this seems absurd.
Following this reason, why can't there be an element of consciousness that transcends its mere mathematical description? And if a simulation of an atom is not automatically an atom, then perhaps a simulation of consciousness isn't automatically conscious?
Relabeling Argument
Let's suppose I have a system with a variable x which takes values between 0 and 10. Suppose we define a second variable y which is also between 0 and 10 which satisfies x+y=10.
Is this a different system than the original? It seems this comes down to whether y is a new entity or just a relabelling of x. The one thing that I would expect to be uncontroversial here is that it is possible for this new system to just be a relabelling. Whether or not it is necessarily just a relabelling would be much more contentious.
If we were to say that sometimes introducing a variable that like that could be more than just a relabelling, then that would be to accept that objects can have a nature that is not fully encapsulated by their mathematical definition as I previously argued.
On the other hand, if circumstances like this are always just a relabelling, then there is no difference between the system with y in it and the system without y in it. This becomes important when y is a much more complicated property, such as the amount of "pain" an organism is experiencing. If the system is the same with the entity representing pain or without this entity, then it seems like it can't have been important. This implies that someone insisting it was just a relabelling must then bite the bullet of qualia being unimportant.
Relational Argument
I'll quote Consciousness Comes First:
This argument is very similar to the transcendence argument and the relabelling argument in that it asserts things can be more than their mathematical descriptions, but still different enough that I felt it was worthwhile including separately. Interestingly the article argues the consciousness and conscious observations are what actually get the ball rolling, although I haven't thought this through enough to have a strong position yet.
Against the Illusion Argument
Some people say consciousness or qualia are just illusions. At best, this seems like a really bad analogy. For example, if I think I see an oasis, but it is actually an illusion, then it is the oasis that is illusionary and not my experience of seeing. In other words, if an experience is an illusion, then we still have the experience of seeing that illusion. And any discussion of illusions where the illusion isn't experienced seems to be a very misleading way of using that term.
Arguments against consciousness
I'll finish by noting that there are some very strong arguments against consciousness too. For quite a while I felt that the epiphenomenal theory was the most plausible, but there are two devastating critiques. The first is the evolutionary argument, it seems absurd that positive qualia would line up with events that are evolutionary advantageous and negative qualia would line up with events that are evolutionary disadvantageous if qualia has no causal mechanism to impact evolution. And the second is that it sure looks like qualia has a causal impact, since we are discussing them right now. So to believe in the epiphenomenal theory is to believe qualia for a reason completely independent from us actually having qualia.
These are very strong arguments, but I nonetheless worry about closing the door on this debate too quickly as there are quite possibly theories that we haven't considered yet, especially when there appear to be very strong arguments for qualia as well.