I think in a world where physical things influence a system so pervasively so as to be irrevocable, leaving their causal footprint everywhere, absence of evidence predicts absence of evidence. It's not proof, but evidence, which is something else. A better word might be information. I argue that absence of evidence is information that should influence your bet on the course of future information.

Say I'm looking for alien civilization. I write a magical program to search one planet at a time, and stop when it finds an alien civilization. I argue that with every planet that fails the test, we should consider that as information toward the case that this program will never stop. I think these claims are testable if crafted into narrower versions.

A reframed version of the maxim would be: Absence of evidence is not information for evidence of absence. Another reiteration could be "absence of evidence does not provide predictive utility toward any claims on the evidence of absence". I claim the opposite.

I think the author of your link would say that in my rephrasing of things, the whole class of my examples are negative evidence, because he counts any information as negative or positive evidence, and in consistency he demands perfect ignorance. No peeking in the cat box. Unfortunately, me scanning for planets counts as peeking, or getting information, into portions of a very large cat box.