Games

The point is that flight sticks designed for aerodynamic flight are a dumb way to control a spaceship,

There was a whole genre of fighter-based space combat movies -- and probably comic books and such, then later video games -- that did take inspiration from atmospheric fighter combat. Star Wars, Battlestar Galactica, Wing Commander, Freelancer, etc. And there's a whole genre of conventions that were developed and came with them that weren't hard-realism in terms of space combat, but were intended to be exciting and fun. I don't think that's really specific to any one game, but to the genre.

Some examples:

• Craft don't follow Newtonian physics; instead, they act like they're atmospheric fighters, flying in a sort of fluid, where inertia can be redirected by turning the craft.

• Dogfighting is a thing (whereas in real life, it was on its last legs even for atmospheric fighters when the genre was created).

• Combat normally occurs at relatively-short ranges.

• Weapons have finite ranges.

• Lasers or some sort of energy weapon often follow a Star Wars-style convention of being a colored pulse moving slowly-enough to see, and making a noise.

• Sound propagates through space.

• Missiles and torpedoes are often a thing.

• Explosive warheads exist, though presumably the kinetic energy of weapons in space would be much greater.

• Armor is often a thing, though the practical viability of armor on a spacecraft is limited.

• Some form of energy shield often exists.

• Fighters are manned.

• Fighters have glass cockpits, and someone physically looking through them rather than at computer displays.

• There are beautiful, human-visible nebulas based on false-color NASA images.

Arguably, most of these don't make a lot of sense in a hard realism space war simulation. If I had to guess, a lot of it is basically derived from the American naval war in the Pacific theater in WW2 or the early Cold War. It's probably pretty appealing to an American audience; it's directly analogous to fights that we fought, just in a more-futuristic setting.

But...that doesn't mean that it's a bad set of genre conventions, at least in my eyes. I think that the people who developed the genre came up with a pretty good set of rules to appeal to the consumer. Like, it's not a real universe, no. But neither are vampire conventions or swords-and-sorcery conventions. Hollywood action movies have plenty of gunplay, but the vast majority of shot people don't spend time rolling around noisily dying. All those genres are fictional too, but they're optimized to be enjoyable. I can't rip on them for that -- they've made a lot of content that a lot of people really enjoy, though sometimes it's also nice to delve into harder realism.