Most likely. There's at least one youtuber who has made a career of extreme speculating over shit like this.

There's an unfortunate history of people doing data mining on valve games, then other people seeing the fairly banal stuff that was found and blowing shit way out of proportion.

If I'm remember my shit right on how these "leaks" almost always work... data miners found evidence that Valve has a project labeled 'hlx' in their content management system because someone forgot to clean up some basic internal logging files from it before they pushed a package out as a game update.

I'm pretty sure this "hlx" project has been seen in these files when they forget to delete them as far back as before Alyx was announced, and that there was some evidence that it was just a testing branch they used for experimenting with new engine features using Half Life resources as handy testing tools.

That said, huge grain of salt. It's been ages since I stopped following this shit.