How do I trick Xorg into seeing a TCP remote control as user activity?

I have a new home-made HTPC running Debian bullseye + X11 + LightDM + Kodi 19. The HTPC is connected to a Plasma screen and my local network but not much else (no mouse, no keyboard). Kodi is controlled through Kore, an android remote control app for Kodi that works over the network. My problem is that X doesn't see the remote control's actions as user activity so, after about 10mn, the screen goes black and a mouse has to be plugged-in and jiggled to wake up the screen. My first idea was to disable DPMS and be done with it:

nano /usr/share/X11/xorg.conf.d/10-monitor.conf

Section "Extensions"
        Option      "DPMS" "Disable"
EndSection

But for some reason it didn't work. In the meantime, I changed my mind and thought that having the screen go black after real inactivity would be great, considering the screen is a Plasma and is prone to burn-ins. So: Ho do I make X11 see Kore's inputs as user activity? I have an idea, which would be to make Kore connect to a dummy port (say 8081). Then have a python script running forever on the HTPC, listening on 8081 and forwarding requests to the port Kodi listens on (say 8082). Every time my script proxies a requests, it would trigger a key press (something like Ctrl pressed + Ctrl released to avoid side-effect). I haven't tested it yet but I thought I'd get some different ideas form the community first.