Idk, I didn't play the HL games until years after they came out. What was the new tech? I just remember it being a pretty meh shooter on rails type game. The gravity gun was cool I guess.
I took a game design course in college and the professor was very stuck on HL2, to the point he told us it was perfect because it was so interactive, and that any game with a cutscene in it was a failure because those aren't interactive.
Since then, it doesn't seem to me that the industry has taken this advice.
I wouldn't go quite as far as he did—I think there are many different ways for video games to tell stories. But the way that Half Life and especially Portal does it is extremely effective—and I haven't seen any other games pull it off or even really attempt it!
I would argue even Half Life: Alyx doesn't really follow the Half Life storytelling formula, because the main character isn't mute. When the character can speak of his/her own accord, they aren't really you, they're a different person.
There was absolutely nothing like it before it. It's like claiming no one cared when Halo 2 and 3 was released.