Honestly, this is a good thing. No one should be buying mechanical watches as investments expecting them to be appreciating assets. This shouldn't hurt Rolex, Patek, AP, VC, etc, as there's plenty of demand for their products and they're not selling them on the secondary market anyway. If it does end up hurting them, it's only because they allowed their ADs to participate in all kinds of shady behavior that ultimately drove up the secondary market pricing.
I agree with you, although perhaps for slightly different reasons:
As of 2022, within the vicinity of almost any mechanical watch, there are likely to be tens or perhaps hundreds of inexpensive satellite-based location-estimation devices (GNSS) - inside smartphones, vehicles, internet-of-things devices, etc. There are also purely radio-based clock signals.
Those receivers, which are usually entirely passive (receive-only) measure accurate time signals as a component of their functionality.
It's important (and useful!) to track time accurately, and there's certainly nostalgia/envy aplenty to be had in the notion that our ancestors (who may have grown up in an era prior to GNSS) express their devotion through the symbolic hand-me-down of mechanical watches, but... perhaps it's sensible not to be pressured by the hype and -- nowadays -- irrational financial cost (of which, despite the ostensibly factual nature, I think this article is part).
I guess a less trite and more actionable way to state this would be: consider saving yourself the economic cost of a mechanical watch (first-hand or second-hand), and instead spend literal time with the person you love and intended to provide it to - potentially using the amount saved to help fund and remember the moment.
Similarly: if that person would have preferred an expensive timepiece to actual time spent with you, then.. I suppose it's a good deal either way?