Issues creating a vector using "Create Object mosaic"

Hello community 🙂

I am trying to turn a PNG into a Vector file in Illustrator so I can edit the colors precisely, and I am having some issues.

The original image is a cellular automata, so it is pixelated by nature. "Image Trace" didn't do a good job of precisely tracing the image, so I used the "Create Object Mosaic" function. This worked really well but it took hours and hours to compute the file. Then once the file was converted to a vector, it was extremely slow to do anything, like zooming in or selecting colors.

Is there a better way to do this? My goal is to have this file be a vector so I can easily edit the individual colors and export the file at varying sizes without the image getting blurry.

Thanks!

Here is a close-up of the image. The actual image is much bigger.