As I said before this is not the place to go through the details of abiogenesis hypotheses, it's a big field. But if you search for '
abiogenesis lipid vesicles' you'll get some articles on proposals for protocells. For example, here's a paper that gives an overview of one hypothesis:
The minimotif synthesis hypothesis for the origin of life (nih.gov).
The earliest protocells may not initially have had explicit genomes, as I already mentioned, they may have started with self-replicating reaction sequences which later acquired genomic features by modification of enzymatic RNA, or something similar.
The pathway from the earliest cells to present days cells was evolution by natural selection.
The question with 2/ is by what criteria do you decide when a collection of non-living chemical reactions have become life. There is no universal definition of life. We already have self-assembling protocells that grow and divide. We already have simple self-sustaining metabolic cycles, we already have self-replicating RNA, and many other features commonly associated with life. They haven't yet all been put together, but I suspect it's just a matter of time.
As mentioned a while ago, it's useful, when deciding the criteria for the simplest form of life, to consider whether fire would satisfy those criteria, and whether viruses are alive.