We could be late too, it hasn't even been 200 years since we're technologically capable.

The universe is physically big, which means we'd have a hard time finding life even if it was going on at the same time as us, but add time to the equation and it's game over. There could have been a star trek tier civilisation next door that died 1m years ago and we would probably never know

If a civilisation spreads to stars then logically it will continue to spread (no technology or resource problems) and no event - not even super novas - could stop it (as events could only travel at the speed of expansion)

At that point you don’t have a single civilisation , you have thousands of functionally independent civilisations, with numbers increasing all the time. Sure something could wipe out a civ in one star system, but it couldn’t spread to others quickly enough to affect those others.

The most successful civilisations would continue to expand independently over time to take up all the resources in a galaxy.

Unless they found a way to travel faster than light, which means events could spread fast enough to collapse the civilisations.