Along with the question of whether or not Free Will or Determinism are meaningful concepts in this universe, I'd argue that the question creates a distraction from how human minds work.
That distraction is the concept of choice.
If one examines what minds do and how thoughts form and are used, I think it's pretty clear that very rarely is a human confronted with what we think of as a choice (that is a list of options from which a mind picks).
Most human actions are done by following processes either mindfully or mindlessly. Mindless processes are those that might as well be done by robots, mindful ones are done with self correction. People need to learn how to correct the actions they take. They learn by practice, examination of the results and more practice.
This ability to correct and learn is part of what makes sapience a survival characteristic, but nonsapient systems can also learn and correct, but again, not as well as sapient.
Sapience really shines in the ability to hypothesize, imagine, model, and test the modelling. In short, in our ability to consider possible consequences of ways of doing things and correct our actions accordingly.
Sometimes this kind of hypothesizing creates differences large enough to look like choices (e.g. cooking different meals, driving down different roads, posting or not posting on given threads).
But in most cases, the hypothesizing and testing leads to smaller scale corrections (how far to turn the wheel when turning a corner, where to hold the knife when chopping vegetables, etc). Those do not feel like choices because they are continuous not discrete differences.
The more skill we have in doing things, the less it seems like there is choice, because the more we already have a sense of likely consequence and can therefore adjust what we are doing without stopping to consider.
Paradoxically, the less skill we have, the less there seems to be choice either because we either don't have any idea what to do, or we're so ignorant that we're certain what to do (Dunning-Kruger effect).
The sense of choice therefore occurs only in the relatively rare situations of having some, but not enough skill to determine a correctable path to follow.
The relative rarity of these situations and the sense of pressure they engender in our minds has lead to the glorification of the idea of choice and therefore the overly dramatic sense Free Will or lack thereof.
But, the mind that can learn to do things, to hypothesize and correct its actions and learn by the corrections is far more impressive than something that can pick from a list (any computer can be programmed to do that).