cracking the "origin of life" (I put it in quotes because if you subscribe to the panpsychism premise that consciousness is fundamental then the question of hte origin of life is a bit nonsensical; everything is a permutation of the same primordial life-consciousness) is a bit like cracking AGI; if some new insight gets us closer to the larger question, it is relevant to the larger question even if the larger question is a superset of the sub-question.
The origin of life means abiogenesis - how the first living "stuff" arose from simpler chemistry.
And it is just as relevant if you believe in panpsychism as it is if you don't - panspsychism holds that rocks and even electrons are conscious to some extent, but that has nothing to do with how we got from organic chemistry to proto-cells (as both protocells and organic molecules have some degree of consciousness in this theory).
Questions of the origin of life are only irrelevant/settled for those who subscribe to explicit divine origins of life, such as Creationists, who hold that God literally created the first life from nothing directly - that it was an unknowable miracle, not a physical process.
It is related in that way.