It’s not really news after a decade, but I still think it’s worth a look. This is something I think about sometimes, and it’s better to let the actual scholars speak.

For whatever reason it’s not mentioned as a candidate great filter very often even though nearly all the later steps on the path to complexity have happened more than once, and there’s lots of habitable looking exoplanets.

Edit: To be clear, this says that just because life started early on Earth, doesn’t really provide much evidence it’s an easy process, if you allow that it could possibly be very unlikely indeed.