It doesn't matter if it's a video game controller or a high-grade steering wheel, as long as it works.

Knowing that they've built the ship to operate using these devices tells me that they have trust in them.

That's... not what labor laws cover.

These ships also have an electronics engineer aboard to take care of such stuff. That's aside from the usual team of marine engineers handling the heavy equipment. In this context, the electronics engineer handles everything from the office equipment to the deck cranes. The engineering team handles the actual engines. They kinda step on each other handling the smaller equipment around the engines (steam plants, pumps, etc -- yes they have steam plants).

And they have excellent machine shops. I expect a consumer joystick to be a) simple to fix and b) cheap and small, so plenty of spares on board.

Source: sailed aboard oil tankers.

Those things don't fail like that. When you're looking at big projects it seems you should delegate more and more money as you go closer to the control, but it turns out you can't affect the reliability of those measurably with large sums of money: a specialized joystick isn't guaranteed to last a ton more than your avg gamer one. But it should make sense to also make a specialized computer, usb connection, ... It's easy to see the optimal is really the consumer grade stuff, you can just replace broken parts, quite differently from say a satellite, where once it's broken it's done.