Gaming

The physical mechanism that causes stick drift exists in all controllers that use resistance of electrical signals instead of something like hall effect sensors. If you have metal sliding over metal, it's going to degrade over time. It's very possible the early controllers had stick drift, it just wasn't noticeable because it was so bad that every early console just had horribly large dead zones. Only the Sega Saturn and Dreamcast used hall effect joysticks back then and that never caught on. So I guarantee that with enough time, a Dual Shock controller would also develop stick drift.

And sometimes things like this are just a thing that happen when you miniaturize electronics. An xbox controller does a LOT more than an atari 2600 controller did, in less space. Cramming more stuff into less space means everything has to be tinier. and when you have abrasive metals rubbing against each other, and the metal is thinner, it's going to wear out faster. They've flown too close to the sun in some cases and they wear out WAY too fast. Which is a widespread problem but not so widespread that there are no working controller. Clearly what they are doing still works.

This isn't nearly as much of planned obsolescence as you would think. They just release a new generation of console and make it not backwards compatible with older controllers for that. This is just that as things get more complex, they become more fragile. I would much rather play Elden Ring on an xbox controller that might get stick drift than an atari 2600 joystick.