I interpret that as a problem with the concept of "sentience" -- the closer you examine it, the more holes it has. I feel like I'm sentient, and so does mostly everybody else (I hear). But I have to take their word for it, because there's no way for them to prove it to me -- they could be like the Chinese room for all I know. Asking whether something is sentient starts looking a lot like asking if it "has a soul". It's unanswerable, and therefore, it's the wrong question to ask. Fun to discuss, sure, but I don't find it a useful way to model reality.

The Chinese Room argument was literally an argument against mechanism / computationalism (ie that your mind is just a really complex neural network.)

So no, "by the same reasoning" humans cannot be considered non sentient.

In fact the original paper is not talking about sentience at all, but intelligence (these are different things.)

And the argument it isn't about declaring something sentient or non-sentient, it simply states that responding with expected outputs to a given input is not proof of sentience or intelligence.

It basically says you have to use some other method to determine if something is intelligent and has "understanding."

You should read up on this a lot more, it's fascinating, and you've got a very incorrect understanding of it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_room