Hi there! Just wanted to thank you for posting this! I also wanted to report that the same thing works for the uConsole, with a small tweak to swap the A/B X/Y mappings. After configuring it this way, I was able to get my buttons mapped correctly in TIC-80.
export SDL_GAMECONTROLLERCONFIG="03000000af1e00002400000010010000,ClockworkPI uConsole,platform:Linux,a:b1,b:b2,x:b0y:b3,back:b8,start:b9,leftx:a0,lefty:a1,"