No. The directories in /tmp are an overlay filesystem that allows read and write access otherwise you wouldn't be able to update assets or retroarch-joypad-autoconfig through Retroarchs update function because /usr/share/retroarch would be read-only.
As stated above RA 1.7.4 was a broken "stable release" so delete your retroarch.cfg and re-run retroarch to create a correct default config.
Sorry my mistake it was the /usr/share entry obviously. Some of the directories have changed from ~/.config/retroarch/ to /tmp.
The dir that specifically made my controllers stop working was:
Should be:
I'm not sure why you've changed from the .config folder to tmp folder on certain entries but I prefer .config as I can access this over samba by default.