Turns out the standard drag and drop for controls in #godot is really well thought out and nicely implemented, which makes it a pity that the first several pages of hits I got when searching for the docs were about hand implementing your own with the physics engine. Which, if dragging objects that interact with the game world is actually part of your gameplay fair enough - but I don't think that's what a lot of the tutorial authors were actually thinking about.
Also, it really does feel that internet search is much less of a solved problem than it was ten years ago.