This thing is a farce, as you said, it lacks taste and purpose like most of the stuff of Cook's Apple.
And as an Apple Watch owner (2 models over 5 years), I can attest that in many ways it is still a piece of shit and in fact for what is the only relevant use case (sports) Apple has no proper cohesive approach and makes very little investment. In fact, they try to push their garbage subscription on you. For the price it is sold at, the Apple Watch is a piece of shit, the price of the SE should be the price of the standard model basically...
Anyway, I don't understand how people are so delusional about the iPhone history but I guess this is Stockholm syndrome trying to defend Apple on everything. Reality is that all the products they made since the iPhone are "meh" at best and not exactly groundbreaking especially when you consider prices...