Never ascribe to malice what can be adequately explained by Microsoft Outlook…
“Melvin, why didn’t our birds dodge the Aeolus satellite?”
“What? Nobody reported any 1e-4 impendings to me! Oh, wait, here’s 30 emails from the ESA in the ‘ignore useless daily emails from production robots’ folder, I guess I set up the Outlook ruleset wrong.”
Highly advanced civilization learned from past highly advanced civilizations to camouflage or be destroyed by more bellicose contemporaneous highly advanced civilizations. Highly advanced civilization needs more resources, can see this thousands of centuries in advance. Conceals sophisticated sensor arrays in large rocks, sends them out to all likely main-sequence stars with large habitable zones and obvious rocky planets. Collects data. Shows up a while later to ‘make peace’ and say hi to the natives. Many highly advanced civilizations engage in this activity simultaneously.