The Chinese room was originally an argument against the consciousness of automatons, but then EPR was an argument against (fundamental) entanglement, Bell more

The Chinese room was originally an argument against the consciousness of automatons, but then EPR was an argument against (fundamental) entanglement, Bell more or less expected his inequality to hold, Michaelson–Morley was interpreted as having found the luminiferous aether, and the Poisson (aka Arago) spot was a reductio ad absurdum of the wave theory of light. All of these things aren’t obsolete, they are still useful pieces of insight, but the state of the art regarding how they should be conceptualized has moved on from what their originators thought. Which is not an argument for any particular intepretation of the Chinese room, it’s only to say that the bare fact that the original author thought of it in a particular way doesn’t mean we should do so.