It makes absolutely no sense that the code would precede the hardware, and the hardware needs shielding.
It’s all a case of dynamic equilibrium in complex systems and emergence. Finality doesn’t really come into it.
Physics very much matters to matter.
For development of any information storage systems made of molecules, there must be a supportive development environment.
To even start the process of doing anything like what we see happening in a cell, homeostasis must be achieved first, and not inelegantly, its not good enough to have a complete cell wall if it has no ports for entry and exit of nutrients and waste product, thats also known as a coffin.
Both the walls and the gates and the information / physical systems to reliably exploit those features must be present at the same time to enable abiogenesis.
If you play around with soap bubbles carefully you can observe phenomena like this.
I would encourage people to stake their life on it, let's put it that way.
I don't object to this explanation of the world, but I reckon it's an uphill battle convincing people that all of the living natural world, and all of human history, their culture, their religions and their science and all the beliefs in-between had their origin in some electrostatic forces. I'm of the opinion that even well-informed people of science haven't had time to fully adjust their world-view during the handful of decades we have known this much.
They're not mutually exclusive. You could have various kinds of autocatalytic sets of molecules, including RNA, inside and outside lipid vesicles, and some of them might have re-produced better than others. Anything that could have happened in an open ocean of nuleotides and amino acids could also take place within a lipid vesicle, just that within some vesicle maybe the right concentrations of molecules had at some point emerged that could more easily reproduce itself than in the open ocean where the particular autocatalytic set could be washed away by the surrounding molecular chaos.