I will admit, for one of my writing ideas, it’s basically this. But, I set a rule that, while there are a very small list of certain kinds of artifacts left behind, most of what this race had was completely destroyed or lost; meaning they only exist as a tragic story about how nothing is permanent. Hopefully it’s an inventive take.

That’s why you gotta have the technologically advanced precursor race that’s still around except they fucked off from the rest of society and keep the technology to themselves since y’all can’t behave.

They track down and confiscate unapproved use of their tech resulting in users needing to make really jank hacks to get around the tech’s DRM.