Yep. We don't even have much of a clue about what our own civilization will look like a few hundred years from now, it seems insane to pretend we would know what a far more advanced alien civilization would look like. Imagine showing someone from a thousand years ago a picture of suburbia and them saying, "Nope, this place must be abandoned...no one is growing crops on the land, there are no wells around, deer and other wildlife are walking around houses without being hunted. Must be no humans there." Even just a few decades ago a lot of people thought we would be building cities under the seas by now (hey, maybe not everyone would do it - but with billions of humans, it would only take a few splinter groups).
It's also worth pointing out that even a civilization at our level existing at the nearest star would be undetectable to us in most circumstances (even in the extremely unlikely event that the timing matched up).
Meaning: likes to explore, accumulate knowledge/understanding, harness the laws of physics for its own betterment/pleasure.
We literally have no idea what a >10^6 more advanced civ would look like.
There’s a kind of parochialism about these arguments. They seem to assume that aliens will be flying around the galaxy communicating by radio in big metal boxes or giant rocket powered rocks looking for planets to xenoform.
But in the same way that ants can’t see a human city around them, it’s possible humans will see no evidence of an advanced civ that isn’t doing any of the things we expect technology to do.