I have no opinion about half speed masters.
With contemporary recordings vinyl is a bit of a crapshoot. I would say over 50% of the time the vinyl is about the same as CD and just very slightly better than streaming. 10% of the time it is worse. The magic lies in the 15-25% of recordings that are clearly better. The fact that the music was digitally mastered is different from how the vinyl is mastered. And old vinyl is almost always better than streaming.
And while the assertion the vinyl has a lower possible dynamic range than streaming is true, the simple fact is many LPs do in reality have more realized dynamic range and sound better.
This guy does an amazing job measuring the dynamic range of a bunch of different media and you can see how widely it can vary between different releases of the same album. One interesting takeaway is how much less compressed most Atmos mixes are. My personal experience is that finding and streaming the Dolby Atmos version from Tidal over Roon is often quite a bit better than the normal version. That is particularly odd given that Roon doesn’t support Atmos so some conversion is occurring.
https://magicvinyldigital.net/
One final note, I was a true believer that vinyl couldn’t be better than streaming three years ago, but hearing other people’s vinyl setups and then building my own convinced me that some minority of the time vinyl was clearly better. The frustration is with all the recordings that sound exactly the same as streaming. Just as an example, forget about buying a Taylor Swift album on vinyl, it is a waste of money. But get Billie Eilish or Lorde’s first albums and the vinyl is a revelation. Side one of the recent vinyl reissue of Kronos Quartet "Black Angels" album is startlingly better than streaming. Of course, all of these differences do require a certain level of system to hear.