It's not quite that bad. There are about 100 known stars within 20 light years; with the nearest only about 5 away.
https://www.stellarcatalog.com/stars.php?offset=100
Actually getting a spacecraft to them in a reasonable amount of time is still well beyond us. But if we could get a probe up to relativistic speads, that would put missions to nearby stars on a similar timescale to existing space missions.
Our ability to actually get