According the the data under your username, you've currently made about 2580 posts on this forum. Presumably you weren't paid to make those posts. So simply describing what *you* would consider an intellectually non-lazy alternative Fithp that would meet the narrative requirements of said species could be accomplished in about 0.039% of your total output to date. A few paragraphs would do... probably about the level of effort required that you would happily - and for free - expend on explaining why you couldn't be bothered.
In my own crappy space opera stories, there are dozens-to low-hundreds of intelligent species that the bulk of Mankind is aware of. All but two of them, though, were created by humans... not just AI, but uplifted dolphins and gorillas and recreated Neanders and such. Why did people do this? Because we could. Because it's cool. Because it's ᚠᚪᛣᚳᛁᚾ' rad.
Of the two generally known truly alien sentients, one (the Thessi) looks not unlike an Ewok or a Teddy Bear; the other (Narth) is a horrifying monster, but recognizably "animal." The first species gets along well with Mankind; the latter avoids humans like the plague because as scary as they are to us, we are creatures of ingrained terror to them. Why? Because *we* look like something from their world.
Could the Thessi have been replaced with something wholly alien? Sure. But why? It wasn't important. Creatures that are vaguely bear-like have evolved several times on Earth; no reason to assume that shape wouldn't arise in alien forests. It's a configuration that clearly makes sense. You don't introduce complexities to stories that don;t need to be there.
