Poor Man's Kinesis Keyboard: The K'Nexis Keyboard (2005)

As someone who does not have fingers that angle to the left, I think perhaps even more important than the thumb cluster is having a columnar or ortholinear layout. I switched from a staggered QWERTY layout to a split, columnar layout similar to the Kenesis (ZSA Moonlander) with Dvorak, and I feel like the columnar aspect was probably the biggest improvement for my hand health.

I also recommend moving control to the location commonly used for caps lock if you're specifically struggling with your pinky hitting control like the OP.

I also just realized this board is the primary photo on this Wikipedia page

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life_hack

Pretty clever, but another option is home row mods

https://precondition.github.io/home-row-mods

See KMonad section for using with QMK compatible keyboard, but there's budget QMK compatible options like https://www.microcenter.com/product/661264/a

Keychron also sells a lot of QMK compatible keyboards. https://www.keychron.com/

Clever hack. The style of keyboard looked old-ish to me but what really landed the point was seeing XEmacs on Windows XP:)