Exactly. I think it's popular because it takes a difficult question and answers it with a conceptually elegant answer that has an evocative and spooky nature metaphor. Unfortunately, since it's so poorly grounded, any second order imagery built off it doesn't really add an explanatory power and usually just winds up as a tortured metaphor.

For example, Yancey Strickler's The dark forest theory of the internet blog post (which he later spun into a book) that made it so popular in think pieces like this completely misunderstands even the dark forest theory metaphor itself.

1: https://www.ystrickler.com/the-dark-forest-theory-of-the-int...