[pfdietz]

It actually does rule out those scenarios.

If intelligent life were that common, and interstellar travel that easy, colonization of the galaxy would have gone to completion billions of years ago. We would never have evolved; Earth and the solar system would long since have been converted to an urban area.

Those fictional places exist purely for the telling of stories, not because they're plausible or internally consistent.

[aureate]

They're not plausible or internally consistent for reasons in my edit. It's not the Fermi "paradox" that rules them out. There could easily be interstellar civilisations in the Milky Way that we haven't observed. They just wouldn't work anything like the ones in Star (Wars|Trek).

[pfdietz]

It's implausible if life tends to spread out. Your scenario there has to assume a universal rule that it never does that, anytime in the past billions of years. That's simply not plausible, especially in fictional universes where in the current times all sorts of species are doing just that.