Game controller just doesn't work with the old Google Earth flight sim

In my first burst of posts about flight simulators several years ago, I noted that the Easter egg flight simulator in Google Earth Pro tried to support game controllers, but didn't work well enough to be usable with them (it was an addendum to the post on X-Plane 11, which handles them with no trouble, though I did mess with the settings quite a bit there to make it work like I liked--back then, I think I was using an XBox One or XBox 360 controller hooked up through USB, rather than the slightly less ancient Bluetooth PS4 DualShock I'm using now).

Well, now it doesn't work at all. When I launch it on my current machine, going into the flight simulator mode with a controller active offers a "Joystick enabled" box that is checked by default, but if you leave that on, the simulation just crashes. Probably just as well, since it never centered correctly, which made joystick control basically unusable.