Can you just bind the movement controls to joystick axis instead of a controller input??

I'm pretty sure analog keyboards have worked without the controller buttons popping up, so it might just be a matter of what/how it is bound triggering it to be treated as a controller by the game.

Nope, doesn't work that way. If I use the analog keyboard with regular WSAD, then yes, it works as a regular keyboard and no buttons popping up. As soon as I bind controller axis to the keyboard, it starts flickerung in combination with a mouse. And for some reason, the game doesn't recognize single joystick axis. But that's ok, it would be working perfectly, if there wasn't the HUD issue...

And btw, you can reproduce this with a regular Xbox controller. Just plug in the controller and make sure it's active in game (press a button if not), then move the mouse around. Same thing. So it's not a problem wether the game recognizes an axis or not, the game just doesn't like usage of controller and mouse at the same time. Kinda disappointing for a mech "sim", if you ask me. An option like in Elden Ring would be nice, where you can choose between prompts in the options menu, but I guess that would be asked too much. I thought maybe a one of the already existing HUD mods for MW5 could fix that.