(There are a thousand more problems, but none of them matter until that first one is overcome.)
I think if one really thinks about this statement, they'll find the opposite to be at least as possible.
(This is the punchline to a joke.)
Is it? I am pretty sure biology will solve good old "are viruses alive?" sooner than we agree on definition of intelligence. "Chinese Room" is at least 40 years old.
Practically speaking, the inherentness of intelligence doesn't really matter because both intelligent-looking entity and provably intelligent entity are capable for societal disruptions anyway. I partly dislike the Chinese Room argument for this reason; it facilitates useless discussions in most cases.
For the folks who lived though it; were the Expert Systems boosters as insufferable in the 80s as the LLM people are now about the path to machine intelligence?
ARPA would throw relatively large sums of money at you, but demand progress reports and a testable goal. Very little got rolled out based on hype. (Let's not talk about vehicle design.) If your project didn't show signs of working, or not enough signs of working, funding ended.
Anything which met goals and worked, we now think of as "automation" or "signal recognition" or "solvers", not "intelligent systems".