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The Dark Forest theory just doesn't make sense on its own terms.
A civilization with access to exponential self-replicating probes is very hard to eradicate. The offense and defense equations change drastically when the latter have massive advantages in mass as well as the ability to disperse.
Further, it doesn't take imaging technology much better than ours to spot biosignatures from the other side of the galaxy. An inferometric telescope maybe an AU across in terms of effective lens size would work just fine. With better modeling, you could simply predict which planets are likely to be habitable, and then RKV the fuck out of them a few hundred million years before they develop multicellular life.
You can launch from distant outposts, outside the galactic plane even, a delay of decades or centuries means nothing on those time scales. No need to make your own system the obvious target. But in return, any civilization close to a Type 2 in terms of energy budget has the ability to sterilize the galaxy and barely notice the expense. They're also likely so dispersed and decentralized with off world outposts and robotic manufacturing and infrastructure that simply blowing up their home planet or razing it with a Nicoll-Dyson beam would only be a mild inconvenience. And there's no way to hide when you have one of those, that we know of.
If there were highly advanced and malevolent civilizations lurking out there, barring truly out there technologies and an implausible ability to cover their tracks in terms of emissions and signatures from before they knew how to start hiding or even the ability to do so, then there is simply no sense in trying to hide.
You should aim to get as big as possible, as fast as possible, if your Von Neumanns arrive at a system that's actually home to a hiding super-civilization, well they'd have found you first, but that's a problem tens of thousands of light years away. If they RKV you, so fucking what, you've got outposts past the Oort and can amass teratons of fuck-you in return. Your best bet is signaling that you're too big to fuck with, and the only way to get there is to grow.
Thankfully it seems that we're alone in the galaxy or even the cluster, unless there's very good reason why civs would have access to energy sources even more abundant than nuclear fusion and also coincidentally ignore all the lovely stars left free to waste theirs.
You can't hide. You can run. You can make them regret it. If you spot techno signatures across the galaxy, better be sure they won't be capable of sending RKVs back, but that's an acceptable cost, and in the meantime you need to rush for all the empty real estate.
There are seriously powerful civilizations in that universe, powers that could snap the Xeelee like a twig. At one point they suggest that the fundamentals of mathematics were weaponized. I think most of the big players were never even biological, they were born when the universe was young, in higher dimensions.
The primary danger doesn't come from relativistic kill vehicles, it comes from one of the higher powers saying 'hey, these guys are behaving a little oddly and might become a future threat, let's stomp them to paste. We're not going to use sunbusting RKVs, we're going to utterly flatten them.' You don't want to draw attention to yourself. Fire off too many RKVs and you might draw the ire of the bigger fish. Outposts past the Oort won't save you from them.
I'm not just talking about the in-universe justifications about the Three Body Problem, it certainly takes its liberties with physics or at least goes hard on the speculation aspect of hard scifi.
I'm talking mostly about our own universe, and to the extent that we have no real reason to think that most of the 3BP tech we see has any basis in reality, my explanation for why the Dark Forest Hypothesis doesn't work is grounded in reality ad we know it. While it's not a bad book, it certainly popularized the notion, and has many people taking it seriously as an explanation for the Fermi Paradox IRL, which it absolutely isn't.
I think it's useful in showing a deeply weird equilibrium which can only be explained by knowledge they don't yet have. The humans thought they were so smart with their fusion drives and railgun battleships...
We also observe a deeply weird equilibrium. Where are the grabby aliens??? Are we the first? I think we're not, I think we shouldn't extensively theorize on these issues till we understand dark matter and dark energy. It's no good getting all up in arms about the Fermi Paradox when we don't understand 95% of the universe.
What could a planetary scale superintelligence achieve in physics? What can stellar scale particle accelerators reveal? We're nowhere near the finish line and are not in a position to judge alien capabilities.
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What does Reykjavik airport have to do with anything?
Well, if earth is going to be hit by relativistic kill missiles, I can hardly imagine a less important spot.
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Assuming not a joke - relativistic kill vehicles.
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You have pretty much also converged on a strategy I had come up with quite a while ago (and didn't talk about because I wanted to potentially implement it in some fiction of my own) - be extremely expansionary, and sterilise/terraform possible habitable planets ahead of time so competition within your Hubble sphere is minimised to the greatest degree possible. The Dark Forest fails to be a satisfactory Fermi paradox solution at least in part because it simply doesn't and can't address why it is that the universe isn't already filled to the brim with intelligent life. On its face it offers up an argument against communication, but that doesn't address the issue of why we don't see grabby aliens everywhere. The utility of expansionism is difficult to ignore.
My personal preferred hypothesis surrounding this (and one I haven't seen in popular discussions of the Fermi paradox) is the idea of an astrobiological phase transition. A possible vehicle for this transition would be gamma-ray bursts (GRBs), which occur when two neutron stars spiral inwards. Star formation peaked 10 billion years ago and has declined since, resulting in a decrease in the rate of GRBs. These bursts are probably capable of sterilising large swaths of the Milky Way possibly hundreds of light years across, and such bursts may have been responsible for some extinctions in earth history.
It seems not implausible that we might be just at a spot in space and time where the frequency of GRBs is low enough to allow for the development of intelligent life (which we would expect to see developing not only here but in many other places concurrently), and we're in a phase transition between an equilibrium state where the universe was devoid of intelligent life and another new equilibrium where the universe would be filled to the brim with it.
Creative. But from what I know they have to be relatively close, and directed for them to be a danger to you. Once you have colonized a few systems it is doubtful one would wipe out a universe of life...
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Regardless of the mechanism in question, be it GRBs, or the low metallicity of early stars, or the tumultuous situation towards the inner galaxy, it seems clear to me that the smart money is on civilizations amassing as much resource and energy as they possibly can.
The fact that we don't see Grabby Aliens, the fact that we're on our way to becoming grabby, all combined with the largest threat to our continued civilization being replacement by what is likely an even more grabby entity (an ASI), well, that suggests we might genuinely be the first kids on the block. And I don't see any reason we have to share, if the protozoal slime wanted that planet they should have invented flags and nuclear pulse propulsion.
Or maybe the Simulators are cutting corners, IDK, but if there's open real estate and nobody seeming to stake a claim, then you take it first and ask questions as and when you have to.
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