I feel that excuse only goes so far. It's funny; the original Half Life was my first PC shooter experience, and Alyx was my first VR experience, but HL1 manages to be engaging for me even now while Alyx already feels stale. Like, I get the decision to dumb the movement way down for VR first timers who might get motion sick, but it goes way too far and offers vanishingly few options for people who might want more immersive physics. Or, like, a sprint button. Apparently I have naturally strong VR legs, but jeez, it bothered me even on my first time with a headset

Other things should still have had more room to expand as the game runs on, too. There's so little weapon variety and even among what it does have, the SMG and pistol fill almost the same niche. Apparently they made the AI painfully bad on purpose, but why couldn't they have saved a more engaging combat experience for the endgame or higher difficulties? And the constant orb puzzles they used to replace the traditional physics based ones get incredibly repetitive, especially when replaying the game.

It fails to iterate on the mechanics it introduces in meaningful ways, instead choosing to introduce new things that are entirely self contained (i.e., the Jeff sequence and the final level's vortigaunt blasts). Like, Jeff was super memorable, but part of the reason for that is he breaks up some seriously repetitive gameplay, and nothing about that level is ever relevant again.

Plus I have other gripes about sound design, physics (especially for heavy objects), even the way fall damage is handled. And the way it retcons Ep2 feels cheap to me. Idk. The game was ultimately fun, but flawed far beyond what I think can be said of the earlier games. Obviously I'm biased, but I wound up having more fun with HL2VR than Alyx.