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The ancient Greeks were geniuses, but I don't think they knew better than us here. It is only around the Enlightenment, long after them, when the question of consciousness really becomes challenging, because of modern science.

Once the world looks like a big mechanism driven by impersonal physical forces, then subjective experience suddenly becomes far harder to explain. And that only really happened around the 17th century.

So while the ancient Greeks may not have needed a word for consciousness, I think we do. We need a way to talk about the thing in Leibniz's Mill that is *not* purely mechanical, that doesn't fit into our modern concept of the world.

my question is: does this focus on mechanism really add anything to the Greek form-matter framing?

So, I am very (very) far from being an expert on Aristotle, but he was facing very different things in need of explanation. AAUI, he distinguished soul and body, but this didn't pose a problem like it does for us, where we know the laws of physics fully explain the body, mechanically.