That’s not true at all. There have always been a lot of reasons to wear a watch that have nothing to do with getting the time. Cheap movements expanded the market to the low-end, but didn’t really change the reasons that people buy watches.
Fundamentally, watches are jewelry. That’s been true forever, but it also isn’t something that can be reduced to “aesthetics” alone (for example, people pay handsome premiums for better mechanical movements, even though it has no impact on the look of a watch. The idea of wearing a well-crafted, tiny mechanical device is itself an attractive prospect.)
It’s the equivalent of people who talk about Windows machines being “better deals” than Apple machines. After all, they both flip bits, right? If all you do is fixate on the function, everything becomes a commodity.
Maybe watches have always been somewhat aesthetic, and while they were made to be pretty in the 1920s, they really did exist as timepieces first and foremost. Now a mechanical watch's main function is the way it makes you feel.
As adornments go, I also think that handing over $500 to a local jewelry artist would get you a better bracelet.
The mechanical-movement wristwatch is obsolete. Bring on the Pip-Boy.
Wristwatches do tell the time, and a decent mechanical one will do so far far longer than any electronics device, even high end quartz wristwatches.
Not having any moving parts would generally mean a quartz movement will be more durable.
Barely, and replacement parts (and sometimes even appropriate batteries) can be extremely hard to source.
> Not having any moving parts
Electronics are brittle and do degrade over time. As I observe them, they last about 20 to 30 years realistically. Early mass produced commercial quartz watches are prized collector items, whereas mechanical watches from before the quartz revolution are easy to find in perfect working condition.
Equally technically, non-functional mechanical-movement watches from before piezoelectric-movement are also easy to find in garbage heaps and bankrupted watch-repair shops, and the "perfect working condition" of the functional ones are possibly a result of Ship-of-Theseus-style maintenance. Note that mechanical timepiece repair is a somewhat less viable business than it once was, and able to support only a tiny fraction of workers as it once did.
Quartz watches have fewer individual repair parts available, because the typical repairs are to replace the battery and to replace the entire movement. Now, it is reasonable to consider the repair part for a broken quartz watch to be a newly-manufactured watch, and the repair procedure is to remove the broken watch from your wrist and replace it with the working new one.
Mechanical watches are certainly useless when removed from Earth, whereas electronic timepieces may be reprogrammed to display the numbers of a different timekeeping convention.
Since then, you've been able to get a cheap, reliable watch for next to nothing. Quartz movement, combined with mechanization of production, ensured that. The whole industry had to adapt to making watches themselves sort of an aesthetic statement, not a practical tool to keep you from being late.
At this point, any watch costing more than $25 is itself an aesthetic piece. Part of that aesthetic is where and how it's made. There's probably a market for watches made in Antarctica because of whatever sense of taste that "story" appeals to.