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Earliest game I can think of would be Super Metroid, with it's X-Ray Scanner, which is an upgrade you get partway through the game. It's not 100% necessary, but some of the game's secrets are designed with it in mind.
The Metroid Prime games implemented an FPS version of this pretty well. Really contributed to the atmosphere in some places. Also, while the visors let you see otherwise invisible things, they also made other things harder to see (or, in the case of the scanning visor, you couldn't shoot while it was on.)
Super Metroid's X-Ray is so cumbersome to use, I played it again recently and just wished for something like the tweet complained about.
But you're right, it's not needed, not even on the first playthrough, as no key item is hidden in such a fashion in the game. Interestingly, sometimes it doesn't even do anything, like when your path is only visually blocked by foreground.
Unfortunately, I was playing the Super Metroid / Link to the Past randomizer and had forgotten some locations, so I did have to use it every now and then.