I mean, define "life" then.
One of the indicators of life I like to use, that seems to be useful in the general sense is that life is good at decreasing (fighting against) entropy at a local level. So fire for example increases entropy. A living being takes in raw materials plus energy, and produces a lower entropy (higher organization) of those inputs. Like plants making sugar, and pulling apart CO2 to make free oxygen. Or animals taking in sugar and oxygen, the output is higher entropy (CO2) but you have higher organization of material (lower entropy) locally within that organism.
This also means that life doesn't necessarily need to reproduce (although that is how life that we know of works). You could theoretically have a living being that kept evolving its own form but never developed the ability to copy itself. It just keeps consuming energy and environmental items, and maintaining its own internal complex structures.
If you take away my food, I will still have energy to find more. If you take away my air, I will still have air (albeit quite time-limited) to find more. That gradient is how we understand something to be alive.
I think if we go further down the logic hole and start questioning that by virtue of it being something you can start yourself with a tinderbox, that fire is not life, we question the entire premise of ideas like abiogenesis which argue life is inevitable when certain chemical conditions being met.
Not really. Everything you described is a property of chemistry and physics, not biology. Coals smolder under high residual heat and a lack of oxygen, not because of gated ion channels, osmotic barriers or any other evolved structure.
> This is akin to clonal propagation to ensure survival that we see in many species, or the release of many progeny over an area banking on the reality that most will not survive, but some will.
It's really not. Fire has no genome, nor a biological urge to reproduce. Cinders are a result of physics - pieces of organic matter fragment, heat causes rising air, some fragments are light enough to rise on hot air. If they are still hot when they land, fire can start at a new location.
Homeostasis seems to be important.
Reproduction seems important, but that's "just" a survival strategy. It doesn't necessarily seem like a requirement for something to be "alive".
I add the context part so we can say a virus is alive if the context of host cells is present, and otherwise not. Similar to how we are alive in the context of being on the Earth's surface, but not on the Sun.