Personally speaking, the biggest thing working against Half Life Alyx for me was Boneworks also existing this year. For the seasoned VR player that doesn't get motion sick and doesn't care about the story so much, Boneworks simply had more compelling gameplay and, to me anyway, felt like a better successor to Half Life 2 than Alyx did. Alyx is a far more accessible game though, and I don't think it's a worse game than boneworks necessarily, it just had different priorities that didn't fully align with what I wanted.
For those unaware, Boneworks is basically a full physics simulation of absolutely everything, including your own body in the game world. Objects deal damage based on actual physics calculations, everything can be a weapon. Navigation is also far more engaging because of the all physics all the time nature of the game. Half Life Alyx is more of a hybrid approach so that they could really pump up the fidelity of the game via baked lighting (everything you see that looks perfectly situated in Alyx is a completely static object, you can't interact with it). There's 0 physical damage in Alyx, it's use the gun or die. There's plenty of interactivity though and the game oozes charm and passion, don't get me wrong, but the vision and secret sauce of half life was always the physics simulation, so to see an indie game release along side it that was clearly inspired by the series and flat out does it better was a bit of a letdown.
So yeah, in a sense I think Boneworks may have diverted the hype a bit. And if it needs to be said, I highly recommend that game to seasoned VR players.