Keyboard stuck after a while of playing

Was playing survival and left my computer for a couple of minutes. When I got back my ESC key opened up windows start menu, leaving me unable to access menus so I couldn't save and restart. Sitting in a cockpit saved me there though.

After pressing ESC to open windows start menu (lol) I could quit the game with mouse controls and that's when I noticed my keyboard was unresponsive system wide. ESC still opened the start menu, windows key did nothing, number keys switched tabs in my browser, hitting space in text input fields spelled out a very ominous ":> " as a single character. That prompted me to immediately run a virus scan that showed nothing thankfully.

Restarting computer solved it but hesitant to play SE2 again for a while now until some insight into this has been gained. Only ever encountered this in SE2, read all the other posts about similar things happening to people.

EDIT:

I read some posts on Steam stating that CTRL key sometimes gets stuck and realized this maps to my issue. Perfectly matches the behavior. Switching USB ports didn't resolve it, only a system restart solved it.