It is “important to remember” precisely because these days people are not remembering this and speak with a sense of inevitability about discovering life elsewhere, which sense of inevitability is totally unsupported. I may gently point out, your own post says “it is only a matter of time before science can connect the dots”, reflecting this (in my view) distorted sense. The abiogenesis research you cite is absolutely worthwhile, but it is not even clear if it is in the right direction and certainly far, far from successfully sparking the sustained chain reaction of life. To my eye, equally consistent (as some different research may suggest) is that a combinatorial needle must be threaded to the tune of p < 10^-23 per exoplanet, making it unlikely to happen again in our observable universe.
> It is “important to remember” precisely because these days people are not remembering this and speak with a sense of inevitability about discovering life elsewhere
Could you expand on this a bit. Whether someone speaks with a sense of inevitability or not, why is it important either way? Why is it "important" to remind people we haven't (yet) found life on other planets?
Why are the existing gaps in abiogenesis "important" to point out?
Well, first, I take it to be an axiomatic goal of science to believe that which is true, disbelieve that which is false and to be agnostic about things we have no evidence about; I.e to calibrate our model of world to the world as it is.
But, further, I’ve seen what happens when a subfield reports its findings in a way that misleadingly raises expectations of a titanic discovery just around the corner. When the discovery fails to materialize, over-optimism curdles into its opposite, over-cynicism. Better to calibrate expectations accurately — slow and steady wins the race.
Edit: to cite just the one “combinatorial abiogenesis” reference, see for instance https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-020-58060-0