you will be happy to know gamepads are officially built-in with the Luanti 5.17.0 update
Initial Gamepad Support
Luanti now supports using a wide range of gamepads to move around and interact with the world. Gamepads cannot be used to interact with menus yet, so you’ll still need a mouse or touchscreen for those. You can rebind actions on the gamepad in the settings menu. We plan on improving gamepad support in future releases.
While Luanti previously had experimental support for gamepads, it was quite broken and didn’t work with most hardware. The gamepad code was rewritten to use modern APIs (SDL) and better fit into our codebase.