We should take seriously the later on where consciousness, feeling and perception are not separatable.
The sutta on the cessation is a higher pleasure has someone ask, how can it be pleasure when there’s nothing felt, exactly because there’s nothing felt that it’s bliss.
From the 3rd Jhāna onwards, we have the peak of pleasant feelings, and the peak of neutral feelings would be the neither perception nor non perception. And cessation is no feelings. If there were any awareness there, it can only be aware of neutral feelings. Feelings is of 3 types, pleasant, unpleasant or neutral, not 4 types, pleasant, unpleasant, neutral and no feeling. There’s no awareness of no feeling, thus it’s not part of feelings.
It’s hard indeed to understand it form the self idea point of view, but since there is no self, nothing is better than something. And there’s no contradiction of having no self in nothing, because there’s also no self in something.