Frankly, I had hoped for more, given the title. There's some really cool work that has been done with digital artificial life that has real biological significance. For example, Richard Lenski's group at Michigan State University developed a platform called AVIDA (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avida) that has been used for evolutionary biology research. Slightly different, 2012 saw the publication of the first whole-cell computational model (https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S009286741...). And in the past 30 years, computer simulations of ecosystems have slowly been gaining momentum and acceptance as a tool for addressing ecological questions that are very hard to study in real life (this happens to be the field I work in).
Lenia, on the other hand, is nothing more than an abstraction of Conway's Game of Life. A pretty mathematical pastime that is fun to play around with and gives you some interesting patterns - but nothing that merits the description "biology". The whole paper just reeks with misapplied terms: from "taxonomy" to "ecology" and even "physiology". (They don't have anything to do with their real counterparts.) In short, I fail to find any significance for our knowledge of life on earth, or any other life, for that matter.
Pretty graphs, though.