I believe this argument is fallacious. There could be infinite other ways a species could have evolved to acquire space technology. A smart dinosaur that evolved to use arms and tail could perhaps have built an industrial civilization. They would’ve been now 100 million years old! Imagine the progress. Them being wiped out probably just delayed civilization by millions of years.

Well, dinosaurs learned to fly instead. And perhaps they ended in a local maximum that made them survive and thrive but did not allow development of larger brains.

Not that humans with their troublesome egos are necessarily anywhere near global maximum.

Yes, but they didn't. I do concede that it's possible that they could've.

But even that doesn't guarantee anything. Modern humans are ~100k years old. It took us nearly all of that time before we discovered agriculture. And it still took thousands of years after that to end up with industrialization. Before then our societies barely improved. It's entirely possible that if society had gone differently that we could've delayed or avoided industrialization altogether. The same could've happened with dinosaur-people.