Given the right conditions, such as Earth, life isn't hard. It showed up almost immediately.
There's nothing to do but speculate until proven otherwise, since we don't actually know what those steps exactly are. My personal suspicion is that we are more likely to find life in earth like conditions than anywhere else, though.
The hydrogen bonds allow lots of interesting processes, and it gets used in many many foundational biological functions as hydroxyl groups.
The chemistry of such a simple molecule is difficult if not impossible to replace, and if you have it, the processes that we are familiar with are already efficient enough that there wouldn't be an advantage to not using them.
Is it possibly there are configurations of life, such as not using either DNA or RNA? Sure. Is it likely that we wouldn't recognize that it is life? I doubt it very much. Aside from virii which likely devolved from living things rather than forming along side them, it's not hard to make a distinction at all.
Perhaps mostly in terms of genesis, but also sustainability and even given theoretical evolutionary differences for hypothetical aliens.
But genesis is really the only discussion that matters. Which is also very true for those that believe that there is a good possibility for alien Life.
The math is beyond me to do, but I once got into a conversation with Claude that sought to find the probable distance of the nearest exoplanet that has possible Earth like conditions matching only a couple of additional factors that aren't commonly considered. Whereas I have dozens more. Claude's estimation was that the nearest such planet would be over two million light years away.
Another conversation sought to understand the probability of an exact replica of this solar system somewhere else in the Universe. That probability is zero.
Yet the origins of life are elusive, and perhaps even multiple and relative, that the origins of life might just be a process the universe does countless times, independently. Or perhaps the seeds all started long ago, and life on this side of the universe is related to life on every side of it.