Everyone relies on intuition to determine what sentience is, because there's no clear definition of the term to begin with. The difference is I know that I am sentient so thinking something like me being sentient is a reasonable intuition.

On the other hand thinking a simple data storage structure is sentient merely because it's big doesn't sound very compelling. You think the sentience of a dictionary depends on its size or the words you store in them? A phonebook of the United States is ten times more sentient than one of Spain because you can retrieve more data from it? If you walk into a warehouse does the warehouse become sentient?

You're right that it's exactly like Searle's Chinese Room experiment because Searle was and is correct (and people stil horribly mangle and misunderstand his argument), functionalism is silly. The mechanical turk can play chess better than my cat but is neither sentient or even intelligent, it's just the most proximate machine you interact with.