This is true, but not unusual. Any time you ask for the simplest/earliest/minimal X, you quickly get bogged down in the gray area of what exactly counts as an X

This is true, but not unusual. Any time you ask for the simplest/earliest/minimal X, you quickly get bogged down in the gray area of what exactly counts as an X. So the above doesn't count, okay, make it a bit stricter and it takes a few orders of magnitude more computation to generate self replication. A bit stricter again, another few orders of magnitude. Then we run out of computing power, but can conjecture that by the time you get to the physics of our universe, self replication will presumably still appear at least once in, say, every 1e1000 Hubble volumes. Which is still silver plate territory compared to e.g. Conway's game of life, which has no uphill paths. So you get to pick what level you're satisfied with.