> It just seems so unlikely that we are somehow that special.

That prior is formed by sci-fi media, not science.

> I always felt it overwhelmingly likely that it developed elsewhere too

"Life" is an information complexity characteristic. We know that information complexity is not uniformly distributed in the universe, and in fact the vast majority of the universe is extremely information-poor. Logically from the scientific data you'd assume that "life" in the universe also has a very lopsided distribution.