Like, they couldn't even spring an extra ten bucks for the same controllers that Navy uses.
Granted, a Logitech controller not the first party controllers, and I'm prepared to believe that the Xbox people made a generally better controller, but I'm not convinced it was so much better as to be an actively bad idea to use the Logitech device. Like, once you get to the "pretty good, people won't return it" phase of controller development, its just fine tuning for gameplay performance, and there's absolutely nothing about controlling a tourist submarine that makes e.g. controller latency or even signal integrity above and beyond the baseline the bottleneck. I'd wager that the real reason they picked it likely devolved down to "what driver is our embedded controls engineer most comfortable integrating into our system?", which has a much larger impact on system safety.
I agree with a sibling that there's an argument for using a wired controller. But that's pretty much as far as that criticism goes for me, speaking as someone who writes firmware that does need to be reliably low-latency and responsive, game controllers barely even register on my radar, except that I wouldn't do it myself if I didn't have a specific use case for it.
Better alternatives:
Gamepads: 8bitdo, Gamesir
Joysticks/HOTAS: VKB, Virpil, Winwing
Wheels: Moza, basically anything with direct drive
Any of the above will last _decades_ and greatly outperform a Logitech in precision, in a way that is qualitatively important to realistic vehicle control.