I think they're saying the fake flowers look like buffing pads.

The article mentioned that they did the same thing with The Finals, and that game has reports on protondb saying it's working fine as recently as two days ago.

I'm hopeful this won't be a problem based on that, but I don't know for sure.

I'm in the same boat. As soon as I can get comparable performance at a price I can afford, I'm jumping ship from team green.

If it works in Steam but not in game, maybe try double checking that you've enabled Steam Input for the game. It should be in the settings menu in the game's library page!

If you haven't played since launch, definitely give it another try. There's been so much new stuff added, plus a lot of QoL features which have been super nice!