It's sometimes fun to think that technology is a function of the intelligence that creates it.

What if the aliens have some vastly different perception of reality than us? Things we consider obvious to them may not be, and vice versa. The underlying desires and motivation different.

Humans for example, often tend to invent things for the sake of it. Imagine a species that doesn't do that. Or an organic FTL drive conjured into existence over eons via distributed intelligence. Weird.

E.g., What if the first aliens to find us are hyperintelligent slime molds, whose entire existence is predicated on finding the shortest distance between two points in higher-dimensional space and then traveling there to see what there is to eat?

Here squids evolved into a spacefaring race that is, if at all, only using organic technology and doesn't seem to have consciousness.

They are at war with the spacefaring humans that rely on mecha and AI. It ends with a very non-human and frustrating coexistence message instead of going for all out termination of hostile creatures.