That’s my premise also. Will go further to say this - in our local neighborhood, there is maybe one star per square light year. However, if we move into the center of this galaxy, we find not one star but thousands or millions per square light year. In this case interstellar travel is much easier to achieve.
We don’t hear anything from that area because there is too much background noise if a civilization used radio.
There is another point - energy. Where we live is relatively energy deficient, but at the center there is an unimaginable amount of energy radiating from the accretion disk in the center as it consumes stellar material - a great place to live or move to, if you need lots of energy to ‘do your thing.’
My understanding is that living out here in the exurbs of our solar system is one of the reasons we had sufficient time on earth to develop intelligent life.