You're just talking semantics. To me if I read text that helps me understand something, that's an explanation. The black box it comes from is irrelevant.

LLMs do learn, understand, and make judgments. You're just pushing back on the underlying mechanism, which instead of reason/sentience is instead statistics and weights. I'd call that intelligence but I don't really care if you want to call it something else.

If you believe that an LLM can understand and make judgements then you have fundamentally misunderstood what an LLM is. I'd strongly suggest you read up on the internals.