(2) is arguing for some kind of middle ground between "it's just us" and "lots of tech civs"; i.e., that life can get to the point of sending signals way easier than it can get to the point of launching a probe. But in our case the delta's just going to be a couple centuries, so no, that doesn't work for me either.
There's a lot of reasons there. Certain areas are unhabitable, or at least annoying to create a habitat (the arctic tundra, for example). Beings may want to cluster together (cities). There may be no interest in going to one territory over another - why bother spreading to all places, where there's so much out there?
Finally, you could have situations in which a probe or a highly advanced civilization could deliberately not contact a lesser-advanced civilizations. How do we know that we're not the less-advanced civilization? See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncontacted_peoples
(Yes, I'm being glib, but it's not that much of a stretch.)
I don't have time for this but I'd suggest looking into other discussions on this. The Fermi paradox opens an entire monstrous tree of possibilities, but it's not quite as simple as "there are no VN probes therefore there are no aliens."
My two favorites are:
(1) Interstellar travel might just be too damn hard. Going fast enough to get there in a reasonable time seems to require insane physicists' nightmare propulsion systems like antimatter or fusion rockets or artificial black hole drives, while taking too long means cosmic radiation has too much time to cook both organic matter and electronics... or you can't build a power source that will last that long, etc.
(2) The "uniform cooling hypothesis" -- maybe life is common but intelligences able to build (or become) VN probes are so far incredibly rare. Since the entire universe is (according to the leading theory) the same age, such things simply haven't happened yet.
(1) and (2) could work together-- maybe there are pretty advanced aliens everywhere but so far very few are advanced enough to attempt interstellar flight. If the probability of interstellar flight is less than, say, once per galaxy per billion years, then we would not see VN probes.
Neither (1) nor (2) rules out signals at all.