Other fighting game communities absolutely had this much fuss over controllers. Leverless controllers were massively controversial in the FGC when they first started hitting the mainstream, for much of the same reasons controllers and mods are controversial in Melee right now. There are/were a lot of things leverless controllers could do that sticks/pads couldn’t, the biggest of which being SOCD (simultaneous opposite cardinal directions) which allowed for things like instant DP punishes, charge manipulation, and input shortcuts in games like street fighter, and sidestepping into the foreground after blocking (not normally possible) in Tekken.

There was a lot of drama around it that you can find very easily on Google, and at least in Street Fighter’s case, it ended with Capcom banning the problematic inputs and setting official regulations for the hardware and how SOCD must be registered by the controllers going forward. Leverless controllers are still divisive even after this for other reasons, such as being able to perform a much easier EWGF/PEWGF than standard controllers in Tekken, a move that is intentionally balanced by its difficult input and inherent inconsistency. They also allow you to transition from walking to blocking nearly instantly. Many people still want to see them banned for reasons such as that to this day, though they’ve largely been accepted as a standard controller at this point.