In iPadOS 17.7 my driver shows up in settings just fine. After recompiling with Xcode 16 and installing my app (containing my driver) on iPadOS 18, the app shows up in settings but the driver-enable button is missing from Settings. When I plug-in my custom USB device, the app cannot detect it and I am left with no way to manually enable the driver, as I did in the previous version of iPadOS.
see https://developer.apple.com/forums/thread/763516?answerId=803923022#803923022.
This looks like a bug in iPadOS 18.0, fixed in iPadOS 18.1.