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I have a love/hate relationship with Garmin.

As a motorcyclist and sailor, their hardware is second to none in terms of build quality and robustness. The ability to look down at my Zumo GPS on my motorcycle in a rain storm on a dirt road and have it respond to my wet dirty glove is a close to magic as you will get.

Then there's the watches, the Instinct range is ok but I have a button that doesn't pop back out, my wife's vivoactive suffered the well known touch failure.

However, as a UXer I will say that across all products the software interaction model sucks balls. "China" can and will produce hardware to meet a price point, its not that they can't build good products.

As soon as "China" figures out how to do good UX, the last moat western companies have will fall.

I think the only sports watch company that has an app that is worse than Garmin's is Polar. I have used Garmin devices since 2010, but their UX is (as you say) pretty quirky. They changed the UI/UX of the gpsmap H1 to look more like a smartphone, but it is still weird. Another issue is that their software has been very buggy the last few years, with software only stabilizing 1-2 years after the release. One the largest external source for Garmin information (gpsrchive) has actively recommended against purchasing the H1 because it has been so buggy. Similarly, earlier firmware releases of the Fenix 8 had a lot of issues. Also a lot of functionality of older units hasn't been implemented yet. These are often not small bugs, but of the type, "oopsie, your device froze or rebooted while you were navigating". They basically released an alpha version as a final product.

I don't know about UX, but I've had my Coros watch for a few weeks now and I didn't find it hard to understand. I think it's much easier than when I first learned to use a Fenix watch. It misses some Garmin features though that I'd really like to see like off-course rerouting. But like I said above, they have been adding features at a good pace and a drastically undercutting Garmin on price (most watches less than half the price of the closest Garmin watch).

'China' can do UX just fine, when the incentive is there. Part of the reason UX seems rough, outside of low quality products where it's a tertiary consideration, is cultural differences. User interfaces are part of culture, like everything humans touch. Those preferences shape the resulting tech. Sometimes those choices are less optimal for western users with their own preferences.

https://youtu.be/WSMFnJnY7EA?si=NMz0wd94gM5abxyj