If you spawn into the sim (and havn’t touched the controls yet), the ingame axis will not be synced to your controller. If you go in and out of the menu, it will sync (and as you describe, will move to a different position).
However, if you wiggle the axis in game so your controller and the game are in sync, and you go in and out of the escape menu, it will still be in sync coming back, instead of forcing a 50% position in game.
Thus, that’s this bug solved.
If you’d like the game to sync the throttle position on spawning into the sim, then I’d suggest you open up another thread/feature request for that.