"There may be some universal aspects to sentience."
I'll define sentience for us quite loosely and vaguely to mean "has self awareness" and "knows stuff that would be useful to us", like new fields in mathematics and physics. LMK if that's incorrect.
There may be universal aspects to that, and we're only speculating, so you could be right ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ I have a feeling that "sentience" as a general concept, whatever the definition, contains these "universal aspects" right in the definition, begging the question.
We only have a single data point for even recognizing what sentience is: as you say, some indicators are "motion", "wanting stuff", "energy usage"
Since there are example on Earth of creatures that have all of those traits that are definitely not sentient, can I assume you mean at greater scale? So, motion across interstellar distances and what that implies.
To my mind, motion across interstellar distances is neither necessary nor sufficient to demonstrate "sentience" as defined above. I can easily imagine a mindless entity evolved to spew spores into space with only enough sentience to take advantage of gravity sling shots to speed themselves along the way, that we mistake for spaceships. Or highly advanced, sentient creatures that are immobile, that look to us like barnacles or slime mold, that take thousands of years to complete a single thought.
At the end of the day, I believe we are going to recognize only creatures that evolved under very similar circumstances to us as "sentient": can manipulate objects; can emit signals we recognize as such, at a scale we can comprehend; bonus points for spaceships, clothing, machinery; bonus points for using scientific principles that we do not yet know, but would find useful.
I suspect (admittedly without due cause) that this kind of sentience is exceedingly rare relative to the potential diversity of what is possible; which is to say, that post-first-contact humanity will find our definition of sentience to be astonishingly narrow