Funny you mention Chinese Room and LLMs in the same response, I would say LLMs proved Searle wrong, agents now make cutting edge discoveries and meaningful problem solving. They not lookup tables though and you need to pay for inference, so the intuition of syntax doing the work of semantics without understanding was wrong.
Whether it's useful or not isn't the point. Chinese Room was a consideration as to what counts as knowledge. Chinese Room / LLM is not knowledge, it's pattern matching.
Having a dude doing translations has always been useful even if they didn't understand the subject matter. Happened all the time pre LLMs
