Not too much to add here, but for one humble reminder: we have a VERY small sample size here.
People talk about the length of time it took for life to evolve on Earth, how long it takes to evolve intelligence, etc., without remembering that’s how long it took on Earth.
On another planet, with different environmental factors, and different amounts of luck, who is to say that life couldn’t have evolved faster, or intelligence shown up sooner? Without having any other examples to study, it’s just as likely that these things would happen sooner, or with more prevalence, in other environments.
For example, as many posters have mentioned, being an evolutionary success does not require intelligence. But once a species is intelligent enough to manipulate its environment to its own advantage, then by definition that species will have a major, if not insurmountable, advantage over other species.
That said, a little bit of intelligence helps. A lot of intelligence may not-- the “destroy ourselves” problem at work. Again, without a larger sample size, we can’t assume the latter is an insurmountable challenge-- maybe other species on other planets develop intelligence, and for a variety of reasons they survive (luck, different social dynamics/tolerance for conflict/religious or moral beliefs, etc.).
Bottom line: we just don’t know how rare advanced intelligence really is, what the probabilities/conditions required are for it to show up. We do know, however, that it’s one hell of an advantage, and perhaps ultimately the only advantage that counts (as evolutionarily successful as the dinosaurs were, they couldn’t stop that asteroid, could they?).