The Chinese room thought experiment proved nothing, except that people are willing to latch on to bad philosophy. This author hasn't nailed down consciousness, and so is teetering on the edge of a dualist, vitalist cliff.
Consciousness is just a log file. It's our mind's representation of itself. Suppose we decide to eat something because we're hungry. What actually happens is a vast array of calculations in our meat computer considering many inputs and possibilities. However, once the "eat" action is selected, it summarizes all the calculations into "I was hungry so I decided to eat" and feeds it back into the meat computer as input for the next round of calculation.
Therefore, the only "proof" we have of no consciousness in the current LLM zoo is that they're all once-through.
I'd also point out that even if you accepted the Chinese room thought experiment it doesn't apply.
Modern AI systems have tons of non-deterministic input. They have cameras and they will do completely different things if a photon hits one pixel vs another. This is an input that has true quantum randomness and the computer will have a completely different response based on this true quantum randomness. Modern AI systems are absolutely not deterministic which is required for the Chinese room thought experiment. Non-determinism may apply to a black box computer without real world input but as soon as you add non-determinism which modern real world AI systems absolutely do have you break any comparison to the Chinese room thought experiment.
So the entire "herp derp it's like a catapult" is wrong straight off the bat. Modern AI systems act based on non-deterministic input and since non-determinism propagates and makes the output of the entire system non-deterministic you better have a better explanation than "It's deterministic" to explain why a computer can't be conscious.
Consciousness is just a log file. It's our mind's representation of itself. Suppose we decide to eat something because we're hungry. What actually happens is a vast array of calculations in our meat computer considering many inputs and possibilities. However, once the "eat" action is selected, it summarizes all the calculations into "I was hungry so I decided to eat" and feeds it back into the meat computer as input for the next round of calculation.
Therefore, the only "proof" we have of no consciousness in the current LLM zoo is that they're all once-through.