I'm not sure if you ever found a solution, but thanks to the information you provided about needing at least one button I was able to resolve the same issue for myself.
I used Wejoy (https://github.com/Vantskruv/wejoy) to create a "virtual" joystick with 1 button and 4 axes and just forward the necessary axes from the physical device to the virtual. Hopefully that's useful to you or some future Linux user in need of a fix.