How do I map MIDI pitch bend to something?

I want to map MIDI pitch bend to something, anything … that isn’t a VSTi.

Is this fundamentally broken in Renoise? I’ve never been able to get it to work. I’d like to map it to instrument macros, hydra input sliders etc.

It was fundamentally never implemented
That is because the pitch bend is not a CC controller in the first place.
It still transmits a midi message that imho could be mapped anyway but i suspect that is not easy to give it a generic treatment because the message is a different sub-class.