Or - there's tons of lottery winners and we're bad at finding them.
If qualifying as a technical civilization can be defined as being able to launch a self-replicating interstellar probe (a/k/a a Bracewell-von Neumann probe), we can be confident that our galaxy has not yet had one. Once those probes are out there, they'll saturate the galaxy permanently; and once a technical civilization can launch one, it'll happen eventually. A modern billionaire could probably fund such a project now.
> We can be confident that our galaxy has not yet had one
How can we be confident of that? For all we know the Cambrian explosion was precisely that.
Maybe nothing, but just the fact that we're talking about it is something, IMHO.