Beyond that, life itself modified the environment that produced the original process of abiogenesis. The early Earth featured a carbon-rich acidic ocean. After life emerged, metabolism began altering the planet’s redox chemistry, consuming available chemical free energy, transforming atmospheric and ocean composition, and eventually oxygenating the surface environment. In other words, the machinery that produced life was not left running in the same state. This is why I called it a self-modifying search engine -- search accelerants operate by changing the search landscape that the engine operates over.
A glass of sea water seems so peaceful... with its turbulent combat hellscape of voracious protists and viral shrapnel, where you're lucky to make it through a day without being eaten or lysed.
Some of the oldest replication machinery in our cells still uses the good old rusty RNA building blocks at its core (however nowadays they're propped up with proteins), and the newer machinery is almost entirely "high tech" proteins.
So you could say that in the billions of years, entirely new life forms were created, and they just completely displaced the older, less effecient ones. Probably pure-RNA life forms were not even the first ones, and they completely displaced even more primitive prior biotechnology when they appeared.
We can infer properties and function by looking at genes shared between archea and bacteria that most likely came from such an ancestor; this paints a picture of a DNA-based anaerobic thermophile (think hydrothermal vents) with a membrane and simple anti-virus defenses (CAS).