Only if you don’t believe the Chinese’s plans to colonize the Moon & Mars, as well as Musk’s plan to form a colony on Mars, which is informed by the energy and time requirements it would take to get to planets orbiting other stars.
If they can't bear positive temperatures then all other continents are totally out of bounds for them, while Mars isn't. That's different from the reverse, in that even if we can't naturally live in negative temperatures we can easily enough wear warm clothes and heat up the spaces we live in.
Same reason we find nearby Venus uninhabitable but faraway Europa seems almost colonisable.
Of course there wasn't actually an Antarctic industrial civilisation, but that's not really the point.
Also, any evidence would be found either under 2000 meters of ice or at the bottom of the Antarctic ocean, so we wouldn't know about it yet.
Also, we're discussing prehuman civilisations so dismissing an hypothesis as being an "extraordinary claim" within this context is a bit weird.
I think they have a point on heat management, too much heat can easily make a place totally uninhabitable while cold can practically always be managed.