This is also an argument that didn't sit well with me when I heard Guillaume Verdon / Beff Jezos on his recent Lex podcast state that the universe wants to produce more entropy, and that life evolved the way it has because it's more efficient at producing heat and entropy than, say, a rock.

Perhaps he said that loosely as a figure of speech, because it should be obvious (religious beliefs aside) that the universe does not "want" anything. The remaining question is whether the emergence of life as an efficient entropy generator is coincidental to the laws of thermodynamics, or incentivized (in an evolutionary pressure sense) by them.

Of relevance, the tendency of matter to organize optimally into energy-absorbing and heat-dissipating structures is a whole theory of its own - see MIT Jeremy England's theory https://www.quantamagazine.org/a-new-thermodynamics-theory-o...