We could be in the mist of a local federation of planets if even a third of those star systems supported intelligent life and like you said that's only 20 light years around, quite a small area potentially holding such wide diversity of life...
Estimating the prevalence of civilizations is really tricky business. Here’s how I look at it.
~10% of all stars are yellow dwarf stars like our Sun.
~22% of all yellow dwarf stars are orbited by an Earth-like planet in the habitable zone (HZ).
So about 2% of all stars will be a good candidate for the emergence of life as we know it.
We have no idea how frequently intelligent life will arise on living worlds. But since the average age of warm Earth-like worlds is 2-3 billion years older than the Earth, then if evolution tends to produce intelligent life given adequate timescales (which is a hypothesis that I favor because intelligence is the most successful adaptive advantage in nature), then perhaps half of all living worlds will yield an advanced civilization given adequate time.
That gives us a reasonable baseline estimate: about 1% of all star systems would yield a sentient species. In that case there’s a very good chance that an intelligent species has arisen within 20 light-years of the Earth. It’s another matter to try to estimate their survival rate on cosmological timescales, so maybe it happened nearby and then they perished.
On the other hand, if sentient species tend to survive long enough to develop gravitational field propulsion, then it’s quite likely that they colonize all over the place, shifting the numbers substantially upward – perhaps nearly all habitable worlds have been populated by interstellar civilizations. And perhaps lots of them choose to become purely interstellar, living their lives aboard starships. In this scenario the galaxies could be seething with life both on habitable worlds and moons, and strewn throughout the cosmos aboard residential exploration vessels.
Looking at all of this with a moderately conservative mindset given the potential for life and fairly explosive expansion of civilizations, the situation does seem to favor the likelihood of abundant civilizations which would be on average vastly beyond our level of development.
But lots of other people seem to cling to the idea that life, or at least intelligent life, is some kind of miraculously unlikely development even under ideal conditions. That might be. But such arguments seem very weak these days, because I can see no scientific reason to argue in favor of the rarity of life or even intelligent life: all of the rationalizations that people could once use to justify that perspective have collapsed in the light of modern data, imo. We now know that water is ubiquitous throughout the cosmos, so are amino acids, and we now know that warm Earth-sized worlds will have very similar compositions to the Earth - including a magnetic field, and they'll also retain similar atmospheric compositions.
So if there's a reason that life or even intelligent life would be very rare even under very favorable conditions, I don't see it. At this point it can only be either a religious viewpoint, or one based purely on ego - the need to feel exceptional in the universe. And I find neither of those to be persuasive.