Nintendo had only two buttons until the Gameboy Advance. Even the NES just had two.
Made me wonder whether we're observing some variation of Hotelling's Law [1] in controller design.
PS: the episode mostly is about Panic's upcoming handheld game console Play Date [2] which also has two primary buttons (and a crank!).
[0] https://daringfireball.net/thetalkshow/2019/05/30/ep-252
I know plenty of games can exist with only two buttons, but it’s still limiting and likely to be off putting to many devs.