The Chinese Room thought experiment can also be used as an argument against you being conscious. To me, this makes it obvious that the reasoning of the thought experiment is incorrect:

Your brain runs on the laws of physics, and the laws of physics are just mechanically applying local rules without understanding anything.

So the laws of physics are just like the person at the center of the Chinese Room, following instructions without understanding.

I think Searle's Chinese Room argument is sophistry, for similar reasons to the ones you suggest—the proposition is that the SYSTEM understands Chinese, not any component of the system, and in the latter half of the argument the human is just a component of the system—but Searle does believe that quantum indeterminism is a requirement for consciousness, which I think is a valid response to the argument you've presented here.

If there's actual evidence that quantum determinism is a requirement, then that would have been a valid argument to make instead of the Chinese room one. If the premise is that "it ain't sentient if it ain't quantum", why even bother with such thought experiments?

But there's no such clear evidence, and the quantum hypothesis itself seems to be popular mainly among those who reluctantly accept materialism of consciousness, but are unwilling to fully accept the implications wrt their understanding of "freedom of will". That is, it is more of a religion in disguise.

Yes, I firmly agree with your first paragraph and roughly agree with your second paragraph.

I don't know anything about this domain but I wholeheartedly believe consciousness to be an emergent phenomena that arises in what we may as well call "spontaneously" out of other non-conscious phenomena.

If you apply this rule to machine learning, why can a neural network and it's model not have emergent properties and behavior too?

(Maybe you can't, I dunno, but my toddler-level analogy wants to look at this way)

There is an excellent refutation of the Chinese room argument that goes like this:

The only reason the setup described in the Chinese room argument doesn't feel like consciousness is because it is inherently something with exponential time and/or space complexity. If you could find a way to consistently understand and respond to sentences in Chinese using only polynomial time and space, then that implies real intelligence. In other words, the P/NP distinction is precisely the distinction underlying consciousness.

For more, see:

https://www.scottaaronson.com/papers/philos.pdf