Hence why I draw exactly the opposite conclusion. It's my thinking that if life existed throughout our 13 billion year old galaxy it would have evolved to saoience and consumed all available resources long before the rise of humanity. The fact our planet hasn't been strip mined or colonized is, absent hard data, good reason to believe we're alone.
Bostrom and others have argued that, based on how long evolutionary milestones took on Earth, the "difficult step" is actually complex multicellular life.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-019-39558-8
https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2018/06/momentous-transition...
I agree with your conclusion that Fermi's paradox simply means there is no other intelligent life, though I think the jury's still out as to where the filter is.
Now, they could possibly need stars and galaxies (i.e. all stars in a galaxy) to capture as energy for large enterprises, but pretty sure there's not kardashev 2-3 races in our vicinity --we'd surely know it if there were. Energy is probably the only resource that aliens might go looking for, everything else is presumably abundant.
I think we should really begin colonizing and expanding our biome to other planets asap so we can possibly beat other civilizations to it. I'd trust a civ that grew from our basic microbes over one from silicon -because we know how we turned out at least, we can't be so sure about them.
I'd be interested to see (if I could live long enough) what would happen if we sent microbe probes to every semi-habitable planet we find, then wait 1 million years to see what life progresses from each planet.
We just find that particular gold more difficult to bring to market than gold found outside our gravity well.
To extra-terrestrial aliens, strip-mining would be grabbing all the loose asteroids and comets first, at the "surface", before venturing down into the deeper holes represented by the gravity wells. Stripping larger planets is metaphorically deep-shaft mining, from a space perspective.