I don't think I'm familiar with what you describe, but maybe that's due to the much smaller and more insular community of Dom 1. I'm more used to "everyone hates me and tries to kill me, except maybe one tiny little empire I saved sometime midgame through my intervention and now they are my loyal lackey".
In which case the game, at best, comes to my winning, alongside my lackey, although clearly the win is mine, as he exists only because I let him.
It's not quite the "bloc" you describe, though. If anything, Dom2 seems to discourage this because if you form a big alliance where all of your neighbors are offlimits, what you have is your "teammates" doing redundant research, which is inefficient and wasteful: It's more efficient for the nations in question to devour each other and become a much larger nation.