Alter Yale hadn't acted before because everything was in his plans, including Lily's breakthrough and Yale's great grandfather's help.
In fact, Alter Yale hadn't followed the method that was devised to escape from the time loop because he found a loophole and exploited it.
After all, there wasn't any active control of the God's Punishment creating the loop, so as long as the main conditions were meet it wasn't impossible to break the loop with a different method, but that was easier to say than to do because without Alter Yale using God's Punishment on the Supreme God, it wouldn't have worked.
Alter Yale was a member of the Council of Gods before his time travel, and just traveling through time couldn't erase his qualifications. As long as he wasn't completely killed by someone else, even after reincarnating, he wouldn't lose the qualifications as a member of the Council of Gods.