I agree with your assessment but we should make a distinction between self-aware intelligences (aka consciousness) as an emergent property of a complex system, and biological/ecological intelligence, which is arguably just as complex in its own way, but shaped by totally different factors (natural selection, evolution, genetics, environment, etc.)

It’s inappropriate to compare it to sentience but it is a form of intelligence, just not in the way we usually define it when referring to ourselves or other organisms