It's strange that Apple keeps pushing large watches, given how sensitive they are to design trends. Among traditional non-smart watches, things have started to reverse in the last couple years, with 36mm-39mm watches enjoying a resurgence in popularity.

My guess is that they can't make it battery efficient (non-Ultra watches barely survive a day just showing a watchface and whirring at notifications, with widgets severely lagging in updates due to extremely tight budgets: e.g. weather forecast is nearly always out of date for me, I use the widget to open the app and force it to refresh to get anything accurate), so they're pushing towards bulkier packaging under the guise of ruggedness.