I would just look up Device Manager find the controller there and see what Windows says about it. For the autosplitter stuff I would join the discord. https://discord.gg/3JtHPsBjHD

A modified assembly is currently not allowed, we're looking into this however. In the mean time, if Steam's native controller support isn't working, you can use software like Joy2Key to convert the input into keyboard. This is an odd problem, I looked at the forum and saw other people have had this issue. The weird part to me is that Xbox series X from what i read still uses xinput, which is the API used by 360 controllers and by Windows since 2005. Xinput is also what Hollow Knight has supported since release. I would double check your Windows version, as you maybe on an older version of Windows where the Series X wasn't supported fully. Also from what I've read this is an issue with wireless mode specifically. Check to see whether your controller is getting recognized as xinput or if its being converted to generic gamepad DirectInput which has issues with HK.

Hollow Knight only supports xinput (Xbox) on 1.2.2.1, meaning that you'll need to use Steam's Controller Support or software like joy2key, DS4Windows, etc to use other controllers. If your having issues with an Xbox controller on 1221, I'd recommend you try disabling Steam's Controller support as they can interfere with each other.

A big reason we don't have them IIRC was fluke cheese. Flukes have an RNG chance to have hitboxes linger, meaning that there's a lot of bosses you can kill in 3 seconds or less with a good pattern. Even if it's not flukes, there's a lot of other ways to cheese them. Maintaining a leaderboard for such short runs is difficult, especially with the timer variances (even a frame matters when its that short). It's also slightly redundant when we have the pantheon IL's (which use a lot more tasteful methods)

for a timer, you can pull up https://one.livesplit.org/ on your phone, but theres not going to be an autosplitter for current consoles because its just not possible

you dont need the timer in your recording, however if you dont have a capture card you'll most likely need to record with your phone so in that case you'll need to have a different way to track time if at all