Tried to make it work with RetroPie and Recalbox as well. No luck with manually adding drivers. Got it working with preconfigured RetroPie 4.8 but... I needed to recompile LCD drivers as well:
https://retropie.org.uk/forum/topic/35177/gamepi20-lcd-once-again-retropie-4-8-and-pi-zero-2-w
Had the buttons problem also. When I pressed D-PAD the menu was skipping three positions.
I'd prefer to make it work with 9.1 Recalbox, but things are as they are. There's no proper support from Waveshare.