“Who” is more often identified with individual/identity than sentience. They’re not talking about particular, individual cats.
I'm not sure there is any grammatical rule for this, though. And besides, nobody likes people that nitpick ;)
If the intent and meaning came across and the intention wasn't to offend and the meaning is clear there is zero and I mean zero need to pretend to be offended. The cat doesn't even care and clearly no body here thinks of cats as Bluetooth speakers... what practical purpose does any of this serve? None.
It's all part of that pronoun thing started by transgender people. The desire to be recognized as a certain gender in language codified into a "law" and that law is now being taken to logical extremes in such a way that we have to use the correct term for cats. The next step is to teach cats English so they can actually be offended.
My problem is other people having arbitrary problems with language.