I should have said "the great filter explanation of the Fermi paradox is nonsense." There may be one or more great filters. There may be an early filter, or a late filter, or both. But that issue is orthogonal to why we see an empty sky. We see an empty sky because the amount of time between observing an extraterrestrial intelligence and being absorbed by it is so short that we should expect to exist in an empty-sky universe, regardless of how common life is.

One might then argue about the prevalence of extraterrestrial intelligence based on the age of the universe and the fact that our light cone apparently does not contain any other intelligent life. IMHO a sample size of 1 isn't that interesting however.