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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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