It's the new version of the game that introduced this bug. The Dualsense and Dualshock controller have the touchpad that allows you to perform a click, as a workaround.

It will do that rarely for me, and has for as long as the game has existed. I don't know for certain, but I have a hunch that it's not an issue with the game but an issue with Windows and how it juggles different open tabs. If you open LoP and it's on top but Windows doesn't recognize it as the active program because... who knows why... keypresses won't do anything. That's why when you type you don't simultaneously type in every single open window at once. If you click on the window, it will select that one as the active, 'top' one. It's just coincidental that the game will also recognize the mouse click as input.

I guess one way you could test my theory is to click on the game window as soon as it boots up, before it finishes loading and displays the "Press any key" message, and then try pressing a controller or keyboard key to dismiss that message afterward.

Yeah, this is so obnoxious. I have to just keep restarting until it fixes it. I thought booting from Big Picture Mode had a higher success rate, but that may have just been a placebo.