In my brief testing, I found this to be the case as well. ALVR was constantly having a bad time (stutter, frame drops, audio drops), and the lack of reprojection in SteamVR was miserable.
WiVRn (through Envision) was a bit jank, but worked much better.
You're slightly off here. Elon (and Tesla as an extension) doesn't like LiDAR, and doesn't use it in any of the vehicles. Cost, complexity, and sensor fusion issues make it undesirable to them.
Tesla is using a vision only approach for their various driver assistance features, including FSD (and you should be able to find presentations where he mentions that humans use vision, so the cars should too). Whether that is a good thing or not is up to interpretation.
None of the past or current Tesla models have LiDAR sensors - only radar, ultrasonic, and 7/8 cameras (with radar and ultrasonic sensors being absent from some newer vehicles)
They have an Instagram account (but I can't remember how to get to it, since I don't have Instagram), but they have more designs on their square site
If by "first game" you mean HL1, you could try playing "Black Mesa" which is a fan remake of the game, in the same engine that powers HL2. It's not a 1:1 recreation, but it's close enough (and I feel it improves on some things).
HL2 is also 3 seperate games (HL2, HL2 Episode 1, HL2 Episode 2), so make sure you have all of those in your library.
At the very least, I'd suggest playing HL2/EP1/EP2 before Alyx, since those would provide the expected background for Alyx, despite it technically being a prequel-ish thing.
Good news! Everywhere is becoming a vulnerable area, so there won't be anywhere that fits your criteria :D
Entire west coast is fire and earthquake prone.
Entire east coast is flood/hurricane prone (as shown by hurricane Helene absolutely destroying asheville, which is in the mountians
Central US keeps getting extreme weather / tornadoes.
Shit's on fire, yo.