The problem: the right ”bumper” button (R1) in two of my controllers were not properly staying in push down state, making games like Control a pain to play, because the character picks stuff up and throws it from R1, so mine was constantly throwing stuff.

Controller stripped down

Looks pretty cyber!

Two controllers put to pieces. On the left you can see the two-leveled motherboard.

Controller tester

This was quite useful, and I wish I had realized to use it before ordering any parts https://hardwaretester.com/gamepad {todo photo of how it looks}

It made it abundantly clear the best working controller does not have ghost presses.

Weird button-pusher

Weird tiny piece of plastic not held in place by anything except how it fits into the rest of the controller. The only job of the piece is to push the sync button (for connecting the controller to another host). Arrow below points to the button it presses:

This was probably the most irritating part in of the whole clean-up process, as it easily falls, gets under the sofa or somewhere inside the rest of the controller, and tends to fly out as you are trying to put the controller back together. Ugh.

Neat joystick mechanism

Download 01C3979E-1C87-48F1-82C4-089A2356A3BB.mp4 Looks pretty cyber too?

Results

In the end, I replaced both bumper plastics, because why not when I already had the pieces bought. In hindsight using the controller tester to pinpoint that the problem is probably the microswitch itself would have been a better idea.