It's not necessarily so binary.

I read a fun novel where the rest of the universe had discovered antigrav before internal combustion - that humans basically missed a typically easy, early discovery in physics - and the implications of that for technology transfer in both directions due to wildly different technology trees.

There's also the possibility that "they'll find us before we find them" means "they're reaching out and we have to listen if want the download for the ansible and FTL schematics".