Can't you curate your notifications? I mostly use my watch(Samsung) for health and sleep tracking, silent alarms, timers, some audio controls (though usually the headphones touch controls are enough) and important notifications like teams/calls while at work. I let it show me work email too, so a quick glance can tell me if I care, but I can definitely select which notifications but the watch and have a bunch blocked.
I probably called myself old as I am wont to do(in that intersection where people argue if you are an elder millennial or youngest gen x (1982 effectively)).
Yes, but in the end I spent all this time disabling notifications, when I bought the thing to show me them.. I just realized I don’t need that alert immediately and in fact led to me ignoring them since they became just another annoyance (phone, computer and watch all told me the same thing). It became a negative productivity tool.
As someone who owns both an old Pebble watch and an Apple Watch, there are definitely a lot of days where I think Pebble got it more right than Apple. I think I’d be happiest with something in between that wasn’t artificially weakened by Apple gatekeeping all of their most useful APIs.
My mom wears her Apple watch as her "I've fallen and can't get up" device. She's mildy amused/ irritated at all the orders it gives her. She's especially irritated at the daily reminder to write in her journal - "I don't have a journal, and I'm not starting now."