Mere-ideas, but..

1. there seem to be one hell of alot of the things, so therefore some must have captured rogue-planets, after they calmed-down..

2. that would mean that the atmosphere-stripping might not be universal for all planets orbiting them, only for the planets that orbited them when they were young red-dwarfs..

Being tidally-locked may mean that not having any Van Allen belts may be irrelevant: the radiation they're being bombarded by is coming from their sun, & life could evolve on the opposite side, having warmth, & maybe photosynthesis at the daylight-horizon?

3. Swift caught a red-dwarf emitting a flare 10k times more powreful than any we know about having been ejected by our Sun .. but we're looking at zillions of stars with our satellites, whereas we've only got a few decades of satellites watching our sun: there's a measurement-disparity there, that is significant.

4. universe has surprised ALL of our assumptions about it, through the millenia.. & the ONE rule on Earth for where life is, is: IF life CAN exist in some niche, THEN it does. Period.

Stratospheric bacteria with error-correcting-code DNA ( 4 compartments, each with about 1/3rd of the DNA, so it corrects radiation-induced-damage before dividing into daughter-cells, sorry I can't remember where I read that, it was a couple decades ago ), bacteria eating bedrock, down where it's too hot for anything else to live, etc..

To presume, as we normally do, that universe's rules for life are different on Earth than everywhere-else, is .. neither evidence-based nor correct-reasoning-based.

Therefore, betting that no red-dwarf-orbiting planet has any life on it .. isn't a bet I'd do.

That most such might be lifeless, I've no problem with that.

But any time we assert that "there's no life" in an entire-category of universe's places .. that's just prejudice, from what I can see.

There is some, indirect evidence that microbes used to live on Mars ( chemistry that has no other obvious explanation, e.g. )..

& that would indicate that life's actually a normal-default, but that we evolved too-late to encounter Mars's life..

Oh, & the flaring thing: being closer to a star makes flaring much more dangerous than it is to us: the energy-density at double the distance ( of the flare, between its sun & its planet ) would be 1/4, right? ( distance-squared ),

so closer would be massively more likely to be clobbered..

but .. universe consistently surprises our assumptions, so I'm still holding-to the suspend-judgement, only speak for the majority, not for all, position.

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I think the Mars argument is backwards. The missing magnetic field is the main issue. More regular flares being faster in stripping away the unprotected atmosphere is inconsequential on the time scale we are talking about.

It's cold outside, there's no kind of atmosphere

perhaps in revolt against us having judged them on size.

So Red Dwarfs (Dwarves?) get mad and insecure about being small, and destroy the atmosphere of their local planets? Are they just coal rollers in disguise?

In the late Middle Ages some scholars argued that there could not be humans in the southern hemisphere... a.k.a. antipodes

The idea was that it gets hotter and hotter as you go further south. Eventually it would get too hot for people to survive, certainly at the equator. So you can't cross to the temperate parts of the southern hemisphere.

The Bible doesn't mention creating any other people on the other side of the planet, and none can get there from the northern hemisphere, so therefore they must not exist. Q.E.D.