Simple "Our experience is what world looks like if you happen to be a bunch of neurons firing inside an apes head" is surprisingly strong reply to the questions you raised. If we take neurons that are put together like they are in brain, and give it sensory input that resembles blue ball, we can ask that brain what it thinks it's seeing. It'll answer "blue ball", and there's nothing weird happening here. Here, answering, thinking or even seeing the blue ball is simply a brain state, purely physical phenomenon.

The mystery, as far as I can tell, happens when we notice that we could theoretically try to see the world as that brain would it see, and suddenly we are actually experiencing that blue ball and all the qualias that come with it. Now the magic is in a much smaller space: There is no magic happening when brain claims it sees blue things, and there's nothing mysterious when we take brains point of view and try to understand how we'd see the world if we were just a brain. So the mystery of consciousness seems to hide in "in a world with no observers, can we sensibly talk about what would the world be like if seen from non-sentient things perspective". If we can, the qualia seem to be in every aspect identical to that perspective.

So what's the ontology of perspective? I have no idea, but perspective seems to go hand in hand with something physical even existing, so we could be strictly materialistic while still acknowledging the existence of qualia.