I think it's certainly possible. As you note, a lot of things have to go right to produce a technologically capable species. Arguably there are even other intelligent species on this planet (whales, elephants, etc) but without nimble hands and writing, they stay where they are.
Out of millions of species to ever exist on this planet, exactly one has invented technology beyond a pointy stick, and there's no guarantee we won't use it to destroy ourselves within a short few thousand years of first putting pen to paper.
They estimate the number of possibly habitable planets in our galaxy at 500M. Close enough I guess. If ALL of those planets originate life, but If only 1/10,000,000 species invents technology, (the estimated success rate on our planet) then there might be 50 planets with intelligent, technological life in the milky way. If you add ONE more stipulation then you probably narrow it down to zero, with margin for error.
Keep in mind that being intelligent and having technology isn't necessarily optimal for evolution. Bacteria, ants, and beetles outnumber humans by hilariously large margins. Bacteria may still get the upper hand over us, too. Our antibiotics are wearing out.
Given that the solar system also apparently needs a certain configuration to harbor complex life (large outer planet absorbs enough asteroid impacts, etc) and you can't have too many gamma ray bursts nearby and so on... I don't see why we should assume the galaxy is crawling with intelligent aliens, or even could be. With N=1 we're not left with a lot of hard data on this subject.