I made a little joke project a while back called "Keytarnetes" which used a MIDI controller (in this case a keytar from a Guitar Hero set) to run various actions against a Kubernetes cluster when you pressed the keys. It was really simple to hack together in a night using the mido python library. I basically just had a folder with shell scripts named after the notes and a process that polled for new keypresses and executed the script with the same name when that note that was pressed on the keytar. Maybe something like that could work for you?

I believe the current interest in Arduino, Raspberry Pi Pico, Mini SAM, and the like is because of an interest in how things worked when they were simpler and more mechanical. Especially since they allow for easy cross-breeding of modern computing with something more analog on a bread board or pHAT with any sensor configuration you can imagine.

It sounds like you would find some comfort in and around these devices.