Let's take a step back and look at the numbers behindtheir "retaliations". How many thargoid civilians, civilian thargoid vessels, and civilian thargoid habitations have been destroyed by humans in this conflict? You don't even need to use your fingers for this because the number is zero. Can you even begin to estimate how many innocent humans have been kidnapped or killed during the same period? Thargoids are not the victims in this conflict, we are. When in doubt, I always root for the underdog, but to each their own.
I don't believe it's valid to discount non-civilian deaths, because
a) there's a ton of complicating factors
b) the definition of a Thargoid civilian is down to speculation, but if they do exist, the number is zero not because of our own restraint (our approach is "kill everything in sight"), but because they're not dumb enough to put them in harms way.
c) on the other hand, our number of civilian casualties is not zero not because of a lack of Thargoid restraint, but because people are going to invade Thargoid territory. Do people who have moved into occupied enemy territory even count as civilians? Or are they meatshields to trigger outrage when the Thargoids counterattack in defence of their territory?
d) the bubble attacks (aka the ones that definitely affect civilians) only occur when humans deliberately provoke the Thargoids into attacking human settlements. They are sacrificed for propaganda.
e) the bubble attacks didn't even start until the war was already well underway. The start of this was over the military forces that had invaded the Pleiades.
Incidentally, and related to c), we
can make a rough estimate of human casualties because GalNet sometimes lists them. They're low, because the Thargoids aren't there to kill them. For example, the first attack was against three stations, total system population 2.7 million. Death count listed on GalNet?
They don't even know if it's more than 1,000, but let's scale that up by a hundred and say 100,000. That's 3% for an estimate that is probably orders of magnitude out. Now scale it back down again by ??? because we're only interested in the unknown number of civilians that moved out into Thargoid territory for some reason, but I doubt they had too many office workers out there in place of support staff for the massacre operations and tech harvesting.
If the Thargoids built infrastructure in our territory, used it to launch massacre operations, and stocked it with stolen technology, I don't think we'd be commanded to just disable their station and then leave it, rather than tear it to shreds while it was helpless.