Keep in mind that becoming an ice ball likely led to significantly increased biodiversity, via Wikipedia:
> Since 2009, some researchers have argued that during the Cryogenian Period, potentially the oldest known fossils of sponges, and therefore animals, were formed. However, it is unclear whether these fossils actually belong to sponges, though the authors do not rule out the possibility of such fossils to represent proto-sponges or complex microbial precursors to sponge-grade organisms. The issue of whether or not biology was impacted by this event has not been settled, for example Porter (2000) suggests that new groups of life evolved during this period, including the red algae and green algae, stramenopiles, ciliates, dinoflagellates, and testate amoeba.
> The end of the period also saw the origin of heterotrophic plankton, which would feed on unicellular algae and prokaryotes, ending the bacterial dominance of the oceans.
Even during catastrophic events, life persists in certain niches: deep sea life usually flourishes during massive extinctions because the marine snow becomes a blizzard; ducks survived the dinosaur extinction because rivers obtain bioavailable energy from gravity and erosion, not photosynthesis. So I suspect something like an "Mars vs Venus" cycle is necessary for the evolution of complex life. A highly predictable habitable planet might have cyanobacteria but not algae, since there wouldn't be any selective crises for mutated bacteria to adapt to. It would be awfully hard for a spectrometer to tell the difference between a planet full of bacteria and a pre-civilization planet full pf complex life.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cryogenian