To be honest, the backing up is not trivial for most.

Even for me, while the technical aspect is no problem, the mental burden of thinking to do the backup and then the few minutes it takes to do the backup. Not a problem for a local only FOSS app but its quite a task to keep track of 10+ apps with different backup/export options, backup-passwords and so on. I use a ToDo-App with recurring tasks but still

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.