Quote Originally Posted by IGN
Speaking to Valve as part of a Steam Deck hardware deep-dive, we made sure to ask about drift, and if it had been part of the thought process when designing the machine.

"We've done a ton of testing on reliability, on all fronts really – and all inputs and different environmental factors and all that kind of stuff," replied hardware engineer Yazan Aldehayyat. "I think we feel that this will perform really well. And I think people will be super happy with it. I think that it's going to be a great buy. I mean, obviously every part will fail at some point, but we think people will be very satisfied and happy with this."

Steam Deck designer John Ikeda added that the parts involved were part of that thought process: "We purposely picked something that we knew the performance of, right? We didn't want to take a risk on that, right? As I'm sure our customers don't want us to take a risk on that either."
Steam Deck: Valve Is Doing its Best to Avoid Thumbstick Drift - IGN