The main missions were definitely soft and the games overall have their warts, but that base mechanic was pure art.
You could take all the care in the world and special ops the shit out of it, or you could go in there and Rambo the shit out of it, and each would work or wouldn’t for various reasons and the difficulty scales well enough that you don’t just automatically pick the latter every time.
Only other games that have scratched that itch have been MGSV, Ghost of Tsushima and Sniper Elite.
Most games have some variety of this now but those three along with Far Cry build and scale it well enough that feels like an accomplishment over the course of a whole game.