I don't really blame anyone for not being so taken with Half-Life 2 as I was and still am. My fixation on HL2 is purely because it was the very first PC shooter I ever got to play outside of borderlands, and it really left a super-strong impression with the atmosphere it conjured and the physics sandbox it provided.
I also first played it in 2010 on a hand-me-down mac, when the game was ported to mac OSX for the first time, so it's distinctly lodged in my head for a lot of reasons, and nostalgic for being the first shooter I played that wasn't just some call of duty-like, and I didn't really have Halo yet either—I wouldn't for another year. The only games I could compare it to that I'd played were the Metroid Prime games, which I similarly was and am obsessed with, so I connect the two a lot in my head in ways I don't think I could ever get anyone trying to play it for the first time in 2023 to ever really get.
I don't need other people to get my enjoyment of half life 2, that's just for me.