I really don’t understand the significance of this. If there were really a market for epaper watches, why did no one make them for the last 10 years? Was PebbleOS really so amazing that no one could replicate anything similar?

The Pebble platform doesn’t make it super easy to monetize itself beyond hardware sales. There’s no reason to make a watch like this from a business perspective. Plenty probably could, but no one with the resources to do it properly wanted to make something similar.

Except the creator said he will be selling a new one…

Hobbyists do lots of stuff that companies won’t.