Do you mean ironic to comment on people's beliefs while calling free will into question? Absolutely.

Consciousness might just be an illusion as well. But as you point out, these are the conceptual tools we have to work with.

I prefer to think of it like this. People like to think they are making conscious decisions most of the time while in reality most of the time they aren't. Most of the time people are responding to conditioning/stimuli/response like a trained dancing bear or an insect following a pheromone trail.

Still... people have the possibility of having free will. Sometimes it glimmers through a little.. sometimes more, but in order to really have free will people have to step outside of conditioning/stimuli/response and conceive of themselves differently which is a psychological place most people don't enter for long or very often if ever. But the possibility still exist. Again... just a conceptual model that works for me. Not sure there are hard and fast answers in this realm.

If it's an illusion why is it set up like an illusion at all? If you don't have free will, it's not like you'd be sad or would do something about it. You have no free will. You can't even think negative philosophical questions about it, as a consequence. We could just as well have been born as an awareness trapped inside a meat suit intimately aware that we are just observing what is happening in and around that meat suit. The meat suit would grow up, get in fights, backpack across Asia, get married, get cancer, die. To the outside world, it would be indistinguishable to a person with actual free will.