Good to know regarding killing the running game. Yeah I'm not really opposed to games getting terminated non-gracefully in most cases and it's not like that excludes the option to use the game menus anyway. I get it though it's like hitting alt f4 or some other forced exit, in terms of small potential to cause some issues on occasion.
And no if I only use LB/BB to run the game, the AHK script never seems to start, so the xinput application doesn't start at all nor does the escape binding do anything.
Again if I run it on the side and launch something through LB/BB the script works as expected with the exception of exiting the game application, it starts the xinput application and the escape key does close the xinput application.