Well it will be fine even if you only leave it charging a tiny fraction of the times you use it. And with AAs you have to remember to change them anyway or it will die while you're playing.
And if you think the process of:
opening the back cover, taking out the AAs (especially on the original steam controller), putting them in a charger, and putting new ones back in the controller
is even close to as easy as just setting the controller down on a magnetic charger, I don't know what to tell you.
Personally, panpsychism makes sense to me. Our brains are what make us thinking individuals with memories etc, but the whole universe is conscious. So after we die, we return to pure awareness (without thought or memory)