would anything actually change if ye wenjie never replied?

so i just finished my second reread and this time the ye wenjie stuff hit different. like obviously she's the one who kicks everything off by replying to the trisolaran signal. but i keep going back and forth on whether it actually mattered

like... humanity was already building radio telescopes and broadcasting signals. SETI was a thing. sooner or later someone somewhere would have sent something detectable right? and without the 400 year warning from the trisolarans, we would have had zero prep time. no wallfacer project, no dark forest theory, just a random strike out of nowhere one day

but then again maybe without ye wenjie there's no ETO, no sophon lockdown on physics, and human tech develops way faster. maybe we figure out lightspeed travel on our own before anyone notices us

idk honestly. i keep going in circles on this. did ye wenjie doom us or accidentally save us by giving us a head start? or was first contact just inevitable no matter what she did and the whole thing was always gonna end the same way

curious what you guys think. anyone else gone down this rabbit hole