To be fair we know that a HL Sequel was worked on by Valve several times but always scrapped in various stages of production. So the rumours really came from somewhere reasonable and not just from pure speculation and desperation.

Yesterday I watched the documentary “Hail Statan?”, about The Satanic Temple. Not a bombastic documentary but shows a bit what they are, what modern satanism is and what they do in the US. They do mostly require an intact legal system to fight christian overreach so maybe its over for their legal battles