Note carefully, though, among other things, they may manage to fabricate some complex molecules under special circumstances, and they may even manage to get some of them in contact with each other, but they still have not created life. That is, they have not brought about the continuous expression, action, interaction that constitutes life. They keep working at it and working at it but life is not being produced. In fact, it looks like life is a separate essence in and of itself and something they, acting only in service to denying the presence of God, will not create.
A side point, too. Nowhere is any consideration made to degradation of the complex chemicals they make. They suggest that they came about in complicated circumstances, but nowhere do they indicate that they could have survived in those circumstances long enough to do anything.

From Matrix/DNA perspective, we would trying to insert light ( preference for natural light ) somewhere into the computational simulation. What informations does have these initial polymers? If not about themselves and maybe, the random event producing them? When growing to foldamers, it means acquiring more atoms: which information has the foldamers if not " information about themselves plus information of atoms, which probable they already have? At this point they are still non-biological organization of matter. They are at the same level of minerals, rocks, sand... How could them to jump from here to an astonishing new complexity?
We have a model of the building block of astronomic systems and a theoretical mechanism that makes possible the information from these systems being transferred to terrestrial atoms through stellar energy, cosmic radiation, etc. It happens that the configuration of this astronomic system is exactly the configuration of a lateral base-pair of nucleotides.

"But it has remained a mystery what actions could then prompt short chemical polymer chains to develop into much longer chains that can encode useful protein information."

That is only true for the biochemists that want to do it in chemical pools, while evolutionists and geologists have found potential solutions long since. Alkaline hydrothermal vents works as thermophoresis reactors and thermal gradients in pores as polymerization locales that makes long enough nucleotide sequences (> 200 nt) to produce self-replicating polymers (with template replication in the same hot-cold convective reactor). "The gradient accumulates monomers by thermophoresis and convection while retaining longer polymers exponentially better. ... We experimentally validate the theory ..." [ https://www.ncbi....3657786/ ]

@julianpenrod: The work and its results speak for themselves, and it passed peer review. Your only point seem to be to claim irrelevant criteria and discuss irrelevant religion. And the only reason I respond is in case some other reader does not understand your inept commentary for the trolling it is.