After reading this book, I realized that maybe if one person can’t program their VCR, you could have argued that it’s their fault. But certainly if so many people have problems with it, it’s clearly an issue with the design.
Arguably the VCRs did as well as they could - BUT they made the critical mistake of not realizing that programming and setting the clock would be difficult (and for many uses of the machine, not necessary at all, so nobody would bother figuring it out), and so didn't set the VCR to just not display the clock until the time was set. Very few people bought VCRs to use as a clock, after all.
If you weren't going to use that feature, yeah, it was pointless and could have just stayed blank rather than blinking 12:00 or whatever.
Which means that if you can't figure out how to set the time, you can just remember to disconnect the battery just before noon, and then reconnect it.
The flashing clock on a VCR is actually an error message because if it lost power/lost time, it won't record correctly until you tell it what time it is.
But if you have no timed recording setup, there's no need to report that error.