Back in the Android Wear says, this used to be a feature on my Moto 360, but then in WearOS' next generation/rebranding the feature was lost. Under the idea of separating the watch and phone they somehow just couldn't even include the setting to opt into this.
Just like setting off a timer or alarm on the phone would go off on the watch... Alarms are back (bidirectional too!) but not the timers sadly.
I guess we finally have the technology to sync the two devices again without an external app being installed on both.
That's quite odd, it would be quite a shitty thing to lock it to Pixels. Sorry to hear that!