To me, it's more intuitive that we cannot expect to be alone in this galaxy. Perhaps we're the first advanced civilization, but in that case we will not be the last. The vastness of the universe make the chance of us being one-of-a-kind thing really low. If we accept that laws of physics created us, then they can happen else where. And the Drake equation gives an estimate, albeit we have no idea if the variables are reasonable.
You would probably agree that no other alien civilizations speak English. Why not, in the vastness of the universe? Because while the universe is big, the possibility space of languages is so much bigger that no language will ever be repeated.
If history were such that the entire world spoke one language, we might seriously think that aliens had to speak it too.
A key question is whether life is like a language in an infinite possibility space, or is something special.
But it also means the chance of ever communicating with a different life form is really low.
The Drake equation does not give an estimate. It gives us a train of multiplying factors to which arbitrary values can be assigned, and with it a false sense of a sound estimate.
It's like the lab coat archetype in ads: it looks sciency, but it really isn't.