I think the only change I'd make really is to give the top layer and obviously different colour so you can view from the top and see the current configuration. Currently it just looks confusing because e.g. a - oscillator looks like + instead.
One from 2 weeks ago: https://www.instagram.com/reel/DUxkEiWDS-q/
I'm sure there is much older.
I highly doubt I was the first one (and I mean that was 4 years ago so the one from 2018 definitely precedes it), however it had a bunch of extra features like colors associated with the initial states and the colors would also propagate and merge alongside the cells
The one posted to HN is better in several ways, but I was mainly interested in learning about 3Delight.
I'm really curious what bigger hashlife patterns would look like (metacell, etc.) but the visualization gets tricky with that many objects.