Imagine you create a system of filing cabnets that encode rules to compute AlphaGo on encrypted inputs. This is _clearly_ conceptually possible (if not practical just due to the sheer cost and size).
This system would, as AlphaGo does, be the worlds strongest go player. Even though the human inside may not understand go at all (and certainly wouldn't understand the game they were helping to play, as all the moves would be encrypted).
In this form we see The Chinese Room not as as evidence against AI as intended, but if the argument actually held (and wasn't just a form of intellectually low misdirection) it would be very strong evidence that its idea of "understanding" is of no practical use. ... since what would "understanding" even mean if we couldn't even say that the worlds best go player didn't understand the game at all?
It argues that a system (the room) consisting of a non-chinese speaker and a arbitrarily large and complex rules system and a human cannot "understand" chinese when the human clearly doesn't understand chinese. The human is just a distraction.
You could instead image a variant system where the room contains two people (and no filing cabinets): non-chinese speaking scribe and a chinese speaker. The scribe laboriously transcribes messages without understanding them and passes them to and from the chinese speaker that clearly does.
Obviously the addition of the non-understanding human in that example does not make the system unintelligent. Similarly, the (non-)intelligence of the system in the classic argument is independent of the understanding of the human stuck inside it.
There are interesting question to ask about the nature of intelligence, but the Chinese Room argument draws our attention to none of them and simply obfuscates the issue with an irrelevant misdirection.