I got a Steam Deck with the intention of playing Factorio on it. The controls unfortunately are very frustrating, I'm guessing they made them much better for Switch, I hope they bring the same for Steam Deck.
"Even after the [Nintendo Switch] launch, there is much to do. Next to my screen there's a stack of post-it notes with future improvements, possible features and technical debt I need to solve. As mentioned in the announcement last week, after the launch I will also work on controller support for PC and Steam Deck."[1]
That said, they said in their original Switch blog post[1] that they intend to bring these control mappings to PC/Steam Deck
Personally I don't want to make any adjustments. All the steam deck games I've installed so far have worked flawlessly without me doing anything. Inscryption is the only one where I had, at some point in the game, had to pull up the keyboard, but the launcher warned me that I would have to do that (and even told me about the shortcut).
* most people just want to use the defaults
* if you've never played the game before, it's not clear how you should customize the controls
It is amazing that for every game I looked at there was a core of power users who did propose different schemes that you can just adopt. But it does suck that the game does not necessarily show you the steam deck buttons you need to use.
This is where you're losing