No, no, of course not. You're right. The same exploitation of complexity-difference can be observed all the way up the hierarchy. But that doesn't make it "living". (Or if you define liveness on a spectrum, like we sort of do with sentience/consciousness, then viruses are alive like rust is conscious.)

It's very likely an invariant of complexity. Trade offs (and friendly turtles) all the way. And of course evolution doesn't optimize for QALY at all. So it's not surprising that it hasn't really spent much resources on closing the gap. And now we try to do it because we do find it a better goal than "just" thriving in every imaginable niche on whatever complexity it's possible. (We want to maintain our complexity plus occupy more niches.)