The Chinese Room thought experiment seems like a weird example, since the same could be said of humans. When responding to English, your auditory system passes

The Chinese Room thought experiment seems like a weird example, since the same could be said of humans. When responding to English, your auditory system passes input that it doesn't understand to a bunch of neurons, each of which is processing signals they don't individually understand. You as a whole system, though, can be said to understand English. Likewise, you as an individual might not be said to understand Chinese, though the you-plus-machine system could be said to understand Chinese in the same way as the different components of your brain are said to understand English.) Moreover, even if LLMs don't understand language for some definition of "understand", it doesn't really matter if they are able to act with agency during the course of their simulated understanding; the consequences here, for any sufficiently convincing simulation, are the same.