Yes, there was this recent paper: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-022-04676-3

See also this review: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/PL00006261

They essentially propose that RNA molecules would be ligated to a small number of amino acids and would then use them for catalysis, and from there evolved the ability to create proteins that are not covalently bound to RNA. So this bridges the RNA world with the RNA-peptide world, and from there it's much easier to conceive of how we arrived at modern biology.

There's a good reason to think that this was the path, since in all organisms today, tRNAs are ligated to single amino acids during translation.