1) Someone has to be first. Let's say that there is no filter, and every species that doesn't destroy itself or get destroyed will eventually become technologically advanced to travel around meaningfully in space. There is a certain amount of time it will take for this to happen. Supposedly the universe is ~14B years old, and Earth is ~5B years old. It takes a certain amount of time for abiogenesis, a certain amount of time for life to evolve, and a species to emerge "victorious" long enough to start conquering the universe before the next extinction event. So we could be the "first", or the top 20% anyway, and it'll still take us a while for those top 20% to get anywhere where they can start detecting/traveling anywhere.
2) What is the maximum distance any extraterrestrial life could observe our technology/planet currently? Space is huge, like uncomprehendingly huge... even if we could go anywhere ourselves right now, would we go visit every single planet everywhere without a reason to? And how long would that take? Maybe there hasn't been enough time for a civilization to a) detect us from 100s of light years away and b) travel to us. Maybe detection of life from far away is impossible past a certain point, but traveling there isn't (since it just takes time).
So I guess my thought is, yeah, we might not find life in our solar system, but we might. But even if we do, I don't necessarily think we'll get filtered out either.