I guess some individual series have gotten worse. Debatably the monetization models have gotten worse too. But I think game design has generally improved. I loved Half life, but is the gameplay really better than games like Doom Eternal and Titanfall 2?
If we're talking Half-Life2 then one could argue, that it brings in a whole other dimension compared to the two games you mentioned: physics.
Something that is almost absent in DE & T2 and has (afaik) no gameplay effect.
Yeah I think a lot of commenters here are seeing popular gameplay diverge from the gameplay they prefer. I like the gunplay of Half-Life, Quake, etc, and still fire up openarena with some friends every once in a while, but I spend most of my time playing games with different gun models. Right now I'm busy with Hell Let Loose for example, which is about as far as you can get from the arena shooter gunplay model. People looking for gunplay more like 2004 gaming might want to look into boomer shooters instead