I think this story is tacky and doesn't really make sense. Do they already know what meat is? And if so, why do they act surprised when they find that lifeforms are "made" of it? Why even do they have an opinion on "meat"?
I find it good for a chuckle perhaps but there's nothing profound in here.
It has something to say if you compare it to the traditional arguments against the possibility of AI like Searle's terrible "Chinese Room" analogy - the point is arguing that computers can't possibly think because they are "just machines following programming" is a lot like these mechanical aliens believing that the idea of thinking meat is absurd.
I think you completely missed the point about the Chinese Room. The assertion wasn't that machines can't think or compute, but that they don't necessarily have any experience of the thing they are computing. We still have not the faintest idea where consciousness comes from and the Chinese Room thought experiment I think demonstrates this.
The problem is all this talk of "onsciousness" is vague. It's like "free will" -- it's just words, not a real objective thing that can possibly be studied objectively. It's just that people are vain. We wanted to believe we lived at the center of the universe (or at least our collection of planets) and Copernicus taught us otherwise. Then we believed we were of a different sort of being than the animals until Darwin taught us otherwise. True machine intelligence (although we aren't there yet) frightens us in a very similar sense.
The original formulation of Chinese Room deals with ‘understanding’. One supposes that understanding implies some form of subjective experience. I take OP’s use of ‘think’ to refer to an equivalent concept
This does what the best speculative fiction does, attempts to stretch and expand your understanding of the real world by presenting a provocative fictional reality.
The author is trying to get you to speculate on the kind of intelligence that would say this about humans.
> "“Maybe they’re like the orfolei. You know, a carbon-based intelligence that goes through a meat stage.”"
What they cannot fathom is a sentient lifeform that achieves things but lives their entire lives as meat-based things, flapping their meat mouth parts to make disgusting meat sounds at each other. And I think they really never thought much about human reproduction!
I find it good for a chuckle perhaps but there's nothing profound in here.