most concepts about alien life in popular sci fi suck ass.
like in star wars. fucking wookies, are you kidding me? that's what you come up with. some manbeardog? it's so lazy. why would an alien species come out like this? any sci-fi with humanoid earth-animal hybrids seems ridiculous to me. also, staying with star wars here, why would all these alien races adopt the human way of doing commerce? there's always some inherently greedy capitalist type alien race that holds all the power in the galactic market because for some reason they are super cunning and are better at capitalism than humans. then you always have some sort of reptilian race, some insectoids, some squidmonsters. it's so dumb and clearly illogical. of course they are almost always the same size as humans, too.
generally how every alien race seems to have this super homogenized culture while simultaneously being in a galactic federation of sorts seems absurd to me. it's pretty much just space fantasy. also how would something like capitalism or market competition even be a thing in these types of post-scarcity societys? other than that any form of interstellar or intergalactic trade seems super futile from a logistics perspective. seeing how these sci fi societys never seem to run out of energy and probably already reached kardashev level 2, why would you need stuff from another system? at that point in technology, they should be able to 3d print anything out of whatever matter. there would be no need to transport anything unless it's a very rare element you couldn't produce artificially at that point(super unlikely since we already can produce a lot of exotic particles in particle accelerators right now), and then that only makes sense within a star system.
stuff like dune, where there is pretty much no sentient alien life at all or at least no contact has been made, seems much more plausible in terms of hard sci fi. but that's probably boring to most. the most realistic scenario is that humanity is dead 200 years from now and we have some probes floating around the galaxy for whatever alien civilization that comes after us to possibly find. and we'll never make it further than titan within our own system imo. but personally i doubt that we will ever successfully colonize another planet or moon. i am pretty sure we're dead set on dying out here on earth.