Think on this, the one solar system we can empirically confirm with multiple observation techniques, i.e. we've sent satellites to other planets in, is way different than solar systems we are observing by measuring light differences from light years away.
Basically a huge of range of things have to work on large timescales for intelligent life to evolve on a planet.
Which is why intelligent life apart from us could just be absent or very very rare and far away.
Because our solar system didn't end up with the "peas in a pod" pattern, planet formation they also posited a period of violent collisions that stirred things up. Wild, uneducated, and necessarily oversimplifying speculation: perhaps all these early collisions brought water which helped encourage development of life, and led to the formation of Jupiter, which then protected that life's development.
If we see that in all star systems we know that evolved intelligent life (even if there's only 1 we know of) there is a large Jupiter-like planet, and that's very atypical among star systems, that suggests that Jupiter might have increased the probability that intelligent life evolved here.
Basically things have to (not) happen in a series of steps for life to form, even if other things like a rocky planet being situated in the goldilock zone come true. This is apart from a lot of other factors, like not having a big sun etc etc.
All this suggests even if we consider 'Terrestrial mediocrity' to be true. Life could just very very rare across the universe, if not totally absent.
Again, we've only ever observed a single solar system up close.
There's plenty of differences from our own solar system out there that also don't fit that pattern. Gas Dwarfs are a planetary type that we don't have in our own solar system, for example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gas_dwarf
Its kind of mind blowing, we have techniques both theoretical and practical to only see pixels and yet come up with their exact dimensions.
Even a star wouldn't be anything more than a fat pixel, and the planet would be more like a thin pixel. Plus the star dimming, given the orbit would also be a long drawn phenomenon, like in case of earth(1 year).
I understand we ideally decide these things based on color of the light we see. And light waves stretch as the distance increases, and it can all be figured out by doppler effect.
But its still kind of mind blowing how much we can infer from just these things.