I don't hate my Pixel Watch (yet?) but dear God, getting a text message notification that doesn't actually show you the message is a baffling step backwards coming from a Fitbit.
One is literally just the vibration motor on my wrist, so I can turn off all sound and vibration on my phone without missing calls and texts.
The other is "Extend Unlock" (formerly "Smart Lock") which makes the bad fingerprint reader on my Pixel 7 a non-issue, and is just generally convenient.
Funnily enough they're trying to replace "Extend Unlock" with a new feature called "Watch Unlock" and (quite predictably) they screwed up the implementation so bad it's not worth using at all. It's slower than entering my unlock code and annoying because it vibrates the watch every time my phone unlocks, with a random delay. Luckily they didn't actually remove the old "Extend Unlock" feature, they just hid it. I suppose someday they will remove it and I'll have one less reason to wear a smartwatch.
I personally don't have a problem with that behaviour and find it to be a natural gesture. Maybe the Pixel watch isn't as good at recognizing it.
If you ever used a watch that did show notifications automatically with an always-on screen and then went back to one that doesn't, you would probably notice that it's way slower, and also there are many times where you can see the watch screen but it's not convenient to do a gesture.