Cool project.
I’d suggest if you really want to go the whole hog, use loadcells for the toe brakes and a damper to control how much “squish” they have. That results in a brake that responds to how hard you press rather than how far you press and is far closer to how brakes work in reality… it’s common to use in high end driving sim brake pedals.
When I built my own driving sim brake I used a 100kg loadcell but there’s no need to go that high here and you could use more compact smaller ones. There are several form factors so you could choose whichever you think is easiest to incorporate into your design.