TLDR; "Artificial life" is a misnomer for efforts like this which are simply play on cellular autometa type variations. This phrase is extensively used by biologist to constructing actual living physical cells using non-living material. This paper is not about that and I hope folks stop calling this "artificial life".

Important bit:

Life can be defined as the capabilities of self-organizing (morphogenesis), selfregulating (homeostasis), self-directing (motility), self-replicating (reproduction), entropy reduction (metabolism), growth (development), response to stimuli (sensitivity), response to environment (adaptability), and evolving through mutation and selection (evolvability). Lenia, the subject of this paper, is able to achieve many of them, except self-replication that is yet to be discovered.

Above definition wouldn't be agreed upon by many biologist because the entire concept of environment that is as complex as universe is missing. It's easy to create something that can "thrive" in 2D grids with bunch of simple rules but quite another thing that can thrive in a computer called universe which is simulating 10^80 atoms at once where all quantum and space-time rules aren't even known to us.