Yeah, it’s pretty terrible. For me a smartwatch should be complementary to the phone, reducing the amount of times I need to pull out my phone to do things. Google seems content on making you do everything you do on your phone twice, by making you repeat steps on your watch. With the pixel watch you’ve essentially strapped a standalone smartphone to your wrist.
For you, I guess free is free but there are a lot of design decisions that make me question google. Maybe one day they can match apple in the astronomical technical know-how required for alarm sync.