Could Malthusian tragedy be the Great Filter? Meaning, maybe most civilizations, before they develop AGI or space colonization, breed so much that everyone is too busy trying to survive and reproduce to work on AGI or spaceflight, until a supernova or meteor or plague kills them off.

Since humans don't seem to be headed into this trap, alien species who do fall into this trap would have to differ from humans. Some ways this might happen:

• They're r-selected like insects, i.e. their natural reproduction process involves creating lots of children and then allowing most to die. Once technology makes resources abundant, most of the children survive, leading to an extreme population boom. This seems unlikely, since intelligence is more valuable to species that have few children and invest lots of resources in each child.
• Their reproduction mechanism does not require a 9-month lead time like humans' do; maybe they take only one day to produce a small egg, which then grows externally to the body. This would mean one wealthy alien that wants a lot of children could very quickly create very many children, rapidly causing the population's mean desire-for-children to skyrocket.
• Their lifespans are shorter, so evolution more quickly "realizes" that there's an abundance of resources, and thus the aliens evolve to reproduce a lot. The shorter lifespan would also produce a low ceiling on technological progress, since children would have to be brought up to speed on current science before they can discover new science. This seems unlikely because intelligence benefits from long lifespans.
• Evolution programs them to desperately want to maximize the number of fit children they have, even before they develop civilization. Evolution didn't do this to humans - why not?

Human technological progress doesn't seem to be as fast as it can be, though, which suggests that there's a lot of "slack" time in which civilizations can develop technologically before evolving to be more Malthusian.