So what then? A few thousand humanoids would have picked berries for a few dozen thousand years until the next ELE wiped them out and be gone? That's better how?

We've got exactly one planet's worth of resources to consume in our reach for the stars. Doing nothing and doing it wrong gets us extinction on basically the same galactic time scale.

What a tragedy though, to have a real shot and burn it all up trying to get each other to click on ads for plastic crap no one needed.