IIUC stick drift essentially means the center dead zone moves away from the physical center. The N64 joystick problem was different and worse: with wear, the center dead zone would expand, to the point that the extreme position values could not actually be achieved. So, instead of walking slowly when you want to stand still, you are unable to run at full speed.
I didn't realize that's what stick drift meant at first, because calibrating when you turn the controller on is so easy and obvious that even the N64 could do it!
I think some other controllers will correct for drift after you push them all the way in each direction.
After a few hundred of hours of gameplay the electrical contacts inside the stick become worn out. Once that happens the stick becomes unpredictable and calibration won't help.
With the Switch it's more specific to the sticks on Joy-Con and presumably the Switch Lite. Drift affects other controllers as well including Xbox/Playstation.
What makes the Joy-Con sticks so horrendous in my understanding is 1) they're tiny 2) the shrouds protecting particle ingress into the sensor compartment is wildly inadequate. Rather than the stick having a very large hemisphere under the primary casing and surrounding the sensor compartment, whereby particles that manage to fall in it are directed into the case cavity, the Joy-Con sticks have this dinky paper thin rubber skirt that floats on top of a convex hemisphere on the sensor housing. In use, this skirt can expose the sensor compartment directly to air or it can pick up particles on the housing and drag them into the housing.
I recently found Hall effect Joy-Con sticks on Amazon and am giving those a go right now. This issue is something I'm overly invested in as I think the combination of independent controllers and some fine details in how Splatoon (twitchy shooter) manages motion controls yields the best control scheme for a shooter even compared to mouse and keyboard. Unfortunately outside of the concept the devices are horrible.
The n64 joystick gets a bigger and bigger deadzone. It’s different than drifting, in fact it’s quite the opposite: on the n64 you have to push harder to move your character while with the drifting you struggle to get it not to move
