Because you can break down the "required" biological factors and environmental factors for a "technological intelligence", nothing says you can't have a super advanced species of dolphins with complex language, society and philosophy (although philosophy is somewhat limited by scientific progress) but they are quite unlikely to be a technological society.
Here are a few examples:
1) Sight is almost mandatory to be in the visible or near visible (near IR is ok, near UV is possible but pretty unlikely) part of the spectrum for a technologically advanced species to develop. One can also put an effective lower limit on the optical resolution of sight which is favorite or required for enabling higher intelligence, as well as the fact that a technologically advanced species is more likely to be multichromatic than monochromatic.
Sight is pretty integral into intelligence development, from looking at the stars to seeing the colors of a rainbow, to developing tools and peaking into the microscopic and macroscopic world.
A species whose sight is based echolocation for example is unlikely to gain sufficient information from the environment to develop high intelligence, and more than that they are
quite unlikely to develop complex tools and things like microscopes, telescopes, laser and many other things would be pretty much "inaccessible" to them directly.
Echolocation can also hinder or prevent the development of written languages and written language is a very important part of the technological development of society because it is mandatory for low tech information archiving which allows the society to save information between generations.
2) Fine motor skills this puts some base line requirements for appendages a few very nimble tentacles are ok, hands with nimble fingers are great, claws and hooves on the other hand are not.
This is because you need to be able to develop very fine tools in order to advance your technology 5 fingers with opposable thumbs might not be a strict requirement but you unlikely to see crab people with only crude claws for grabbing and manipulating things.
3) Land dwelling, land dwelling is almost a must for a progressive incremental development of technology, tool making, fire, projectiles, chemistry, flight, electronics all of these are almost impossible to be developed while submerge. A sufficiently advanced species can compensate by creating "dry" areas under the ocean, but incremental development is near impossible. No meteors, no lighting strikes, and while thermal vents can produce some heat you aren't going to be lighting fire, smelting metal, not to mention building LED's under water.
4) Planetary resources and mineral composition slightly less important but also quite important for higher technological advancements fossil fuels in any forms are going to be pretty important as an energy source, it's unlikely that you'll be able to jump from slavery to fusion without having some energy sources in the middle, you can somewhat compensate with biomass fuels but fossil fuels (doesn't have to be oil) are pretty important.
As far as more advanced technologies than the availability of light metals such as aluminum and titanium might be somewhat important as well as "rare earth" elements which are used to make semiconductors.
If you somehow evolve on a planet that doesn't have the required resources to build semiconductors (unlikely but somewhat possible) you are some what unlikely to go much beyond the mid industrial phase, given enough time you might be able to compensate and have some steampunk rocketry and tiny electromechanical computers but don't discount how important solid state computers are for technological advancement.
5) Gravity there is an upper limit on the how strong the gravity can be for technological society to develop also with gravity going much beyond 1.5-2 earth's technological advancement becomes less likely both because the implication it would have the physiology of the species that develop under such conditions and because it makes projectiles, flight, and rocketry less likely or even impossible which sets a higher limit on how much a society can advance or at least at what rate.
And there are many other factors that have certain limitations or highly favorable states that need to be met for technological advancement. If we take what we know about evolution, especially converging evolution, what we know is required to build or achieve certain technological advancement and what conditions are required for those things to be likely to occur you get a situation where while life can take any shape form or size it's considerably likely that if one day a spaceship lands and a few E.T. are going to come out of it they would be considerably more similar to us than to a cockroach, snake, turtle, crab or any other shape or form you can imagine life can create, at least externally.