We can just lump all these together as “qualia”. “There are qualia” is the basest possible conclusion that can be drawn, as opposed to “I have qualia, therefore I am”.

Yeah I take it to mean this way too, its very strange that Descartes is controversial among eg panpsychics because of the fixation on the term 'think' - it seems pretty clear that he was just noticing that qualia exists and is the only real axiom one can rely on for any kind of self-induced philosophy of mind.