Comment by Al-Khwarizmi

As an academic I would expect the same as you, and no, to my knowledge "first paper" is meaningless, at least in academia. Most people's first paper is some small contribution to what their PhD supervisor is doing at the time, where the student tries their best at writing but it ends up so heavily edited that probably 90% of the final text comes from the supervisor :) So typically first papers don't define or represent a researcher. When you start you just don't have the experience to have a great idea and carry it through to a good paper.

Of course here we are talking about a lab, not an individual person, but still I haven't heard of first papers being considered special in any way, even for labs.