[BroJoeK]

quoting article: "Researchers have found evidence of ancient microorganisms that lived in what is now Western Australia at least 4.1 billion years ago.
If confirmed, the discovery suggests that life originated on Earth 300 million years earlier than previously thought."

I don't think that's reported accurately because, as the link I posted above shows:

1. 4.6 billion years ago (bya): Earth first formed.
   
2. 4.5 bya: Earth collides with Theia forming the moon.
   
3. 4.1 to 3.8 bya: Late Heavy Bombardment (LHB)
   
4. 4.1 bya: first evidence of possible life found in Western Australia.
   
5. 3.7 bya: first confirmed evidence of life found in Greenland rocks.
   
6. 3.5 bya: first microbial mat (stromatolite) fossils found in Western Australia.

Point is, we are not talking about just four million years from Earth's formation to first suggestions of life here, rather, we are talking about four hundred million years -- from 4.5 to 4.1 bya.

Yes, that is still an astonishingly short time for such a miraculous event -- life!
But it's a bit more than "instantaneous."

Stromatolite fossils:

[WhiskeyX]

“1. 4.6 billion years ago (bya): Earth first formed.”

Before the “Earth first formed” and the Sun first formed, other stars and planets were formed and subsequently obliterated into nebular clouds of gas, dust, ice, metals, rocks, and asteroids. These materials were subsequently incorporated into the accretion of the Earth and the Moon/Luna. Life had the opportunity of many billions of years to form in the nebulae of interstellar space and/or on prior planetary bodies before the Earth ever came into existence. Until we can compare samples of the earliest forms of Life found on the Earth to samples of even earlier forms of Life found in extraterrestrial locations, there will be no certain means of fixing the place and time of the origin of Life on the Earth.