I think so too, but I just haven’t seen any compelling reason to believe they’re necessary prerequisites for life, as opposed to contingent outcomes of evolution.
I’m much less sure of that, but perhaps more importantly I think much speculation on the origin of life is built on the premise that the first cells have to be capable of self-replication, as opposed to being replicated by environmental processes external to themselves. A very important and crucial distinction.
A modern prokaryotic cell, take a chemoautotroph, will employ enzymes and active transport machinery to take up simple nutrients from the environment(super simple building blocks like CO2 or methane), convert them to it’s own constituents, slowly grow in size, and then through all sorts of complex regulatory processes expand and divide it’s lipid membrane into two, while also replicating it’s genome and sorting the concents of the cell more or less equally between daughter and offspring.
But experiments have shown that a super simple physical mechanism involving nothing but a growing concentration of lipids, and mechanical shear-forces in solution, can produce the same effect. Here the lipid vesicle isn’t replicating itself through a regulated genetic and enzymatic process, it is being replicated by a very simple, dynamic environmental process. Local concentration of lipid increases due to continued (external, environmental) synthesis, resulting in vesicle growth(the lipid molecules tend to clump together and eventually form vesicles when the concentration gets high enough), eventually the vesicle becomes so large it becomes unstable enough that some mechanical disturbance makes it split into two. Here replication is driven externally by the environment, rather than regulated internally by genes.