Show me the protocell they’ve created.
So the inability of OoL researchers to make a protocell is your yardstick for knowing they are not “even close”. Try again. There are many things scientists cannot do now due to theoretical or technological limitations. As history has shown, many of these problems get circumvented with new ways of thinking and/or technology. Will this be the case for OoL research? Time will tell.
You have rebuilt a process you’ve observed can happen naturally. That’s fundamentally different than NOT being able to rebuild a process no one has observed. The fact you compared them is kinda crazy
OoL experiments are basically attempts to reconstruct PLAUSIBLE scenarios that have been hypothesized to have produced life. Since life originated once, we cannot know exactly how it happened, but we can come up with different ideas as to how we think it arose. We can then test aspects of these ideas experimentally. Its as simple as that.