I could stick the watch in a drawer and completely forget about it for decades, and it would be ready to go to work when needed.

Unfortunately, I did not have the foresight to buy such a watch back in the late 70s or early 80s when such a watch was a near commodity item with mass market appeal, and priced accordingly. Now they are luxury items bought for style and priced way higher than I'm willing to spend.

For similar reasons, I have a wind-up alarm clock as a backup for the plug-in digital alarm clock next to my bed. If I have some very important meeting for which oversleeping would be very very bad, I'll wind it up and set its alarm, so that I don't have to worry about a middle of the night power glitch resetting the digital clock.

Unlike with wind-up watches, wind-up alarm clocks are still available as cheap utilitarian items [1], so no foresight is required [2], although in my particular case my wind-up alarm clock [3] is one I've had for at least 50 years. I think I was given it as soon as I was responsible enough to not destroy it and old enough to use it.

[1] https://www.amazon.com/Besplore-Double-Mechanical-Alarm-Silv...

[2] I'm not actually sure that new inexpensive utilitarian wind-up alarm watches are not available, but a bit of Googling only turned up the expensive fashion watches for me.

[3] https://i.imgur.com/4CljfDL.png