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I believe that advanced civilizations would not be blindly expansionist. Instead, they would have figured out how to live sustainably without much footprint. We tend to imagine advanced civilizations to be future iterations of our desires, but maybe, from a surface level, their societies wouldn't look so different than Native American tribes of our past.

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It's not hard to imagine such a scenario, but they'd need to develop some form of interstellar travel or would face extinction when their star dies/changes, thereby severely limiting their galactic presence.

I see your overall point and I think I agree I just think it’s a question of degree rather than a binary expansionist/not. For example, didn’t Native American tribes expand to America from Asia?

It is a binary question whether their expansion is detectable to us at distances of hundreds or thousands of light years. I actually like something about this idea - arguably any species that can't learn to live in a sustainable and small footprint won't last long; so any civilization that does survive on astronomical scales had to pass through this filter and might therefore be undetectable to us.

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