Maybe I’m misunderstanding, but as shown in your link, $HOME does not conflict with the XDG Base Directory Specification. It partially relies on $HOME being defined.

It is fair to have a preference for exceptions. It sounds like there may be a misunderstanding on how Option works.

Have you used languages that didn’t have null and had Option instead? If we look at Rust, you can’t forget not to check it: it is impossible to get the Some of an Option without dealing with the None. You can’t forget this. You can mess up in a lot of other ways, but you explicitly have to decide how to handle that potential None case.

If you want it to fail fast and obvious, there are ways to do this. For example you, you can use the unwrap() method to get the contained Some value or panic if it is None, expect() to do the same but with a custom panic message, the ? operator to get the contained Some value or return the function with None, etc. Tangentially, these also work for Result, which can be Ok or Err.

It is pretty common to use these methods in places where you always want to fail somewhere that you don’t expect should have a None or where you don’t want your code to deal with the consequences of something unexpected. You have decided this and live with the consequences, instead of it implicitly happening/you forgetting to deal with it.

For this example, I feel that it is actually fairly ergonomic in languages that have an Option type (like Rust), which can either be Some value or no value (None), and don’t normally have null as a concept. It normalizes explicitly dealing with the None instead of having null or hidden empty strings and such.

The Steam Deck compatibility notes for the game specifically say that it isn’t good at handling multiple controllers:

This game does not default to external Bluetooth/USB controllers on Deck, and may require manually switching the active controller via the Quick Access Menu

I think it is likely that this problem comes from the game, not a problem with streaming sending the inputs. You can try testing this in another game with more flexible controller support to narrow it down.