[Essential Phone ROMs, Kernels, Recoveries, & Other] starcms:
OK I FIGURED IT OUT, HOW TO GET TWRP TOUCH WORKING FOR EVERYONE

Explanation of issue:

I finally figured this out after thinking about it too long. I was wrong about some Essentials possibly having different touch screens/digitizers. If you don't want to give yourself a headache, just skip to the instructions below.

The reason it worked for some people, including myself, is we followed the directions and flashed TWRP.img to the non-active slot. The non-active slot for us had August still on it (including the August version of hyp and rpm) which is why touch worked in TWRP.img. Once the TWRP zip installer is used, however, TWRP is installed to the ramdisk of the current boot image, and therefore touch works with September when switching back to the active slot (TWRP.img is built with the boot image of August and hence requires August or older hyp and rpm partitions for touch to work with it, BUT the TWRP zip installer installs TWRP to the ramdisk of the current boot image (kernel), and therefore is compatible with any boot image -- it isn't built on a specific boot image to begin with -- it "injects" your boot image with TWRP and is compatible with any boot image: past, present, or future). So the following instructions will always work to install TWRP with working touch.

How to get touch working in TWRP:

a) Make sure you have September on the active slot (and latest rpm and hyp partitions if you messed with those) and have temporarily removed your lockscreen pattern/pin/password. Also make sure you have the stock boot image on your active slot (in case you had previously installed Magisk). Boot into fastboot.

b) Switch slots and flash twrp-3.2.3-0-mata.img to the non-active slot

c) Boot into twrp

d) Since touch doesn't work in TWRP, issue the following commands from your PC to install the TWRP installer since you can't do it by touching the screen:

adb shell twrp sideload

adb sideload twrp-installer-mata-3.2.3-0.zip

e) Exit back to bootloader after sideload is complete using command:

adb reboot bootloader

f) From bootloader, switch back to Active (September) Slot

Congratulations, you are done and have installed TWRP with working touch on to your active slot!

--When you boot into recovery, you will boot into TWRP and your touch will work.

--When you boot into Android, you can add your lockscreen pattern/pin/password back (and now since touch works in TWRP, you'll be able to enter it next time you boot to TWRP).

--If you wish to install Magisk, simply boot into TWRP and flash magisk.zip (Do NOT flash the stock boot image first or you will have erased all the hard work you just did properly installing TWRP).

--These instructions will need to be repeated everytime you update your boot image (kernel) because TWRP has been installed into your current boot image (kernel).

In case twrp-3.2.3-0-mata.img isn't updated by next month's update (October), save and reuse these instructions to install TWRP to October's boot image (kernel).

---------- Post added at 00:47 ---------- Previous post was at 00:46 ----------

If you have no lockscreen pin/pattern/password, but are encrypted, your password is default_password and TWRP (as well as Android) enters it for you automatically.