If you can afford the latest and greatest and spending doesn’t matter, the 9 is an amazing choice. But if I was dipping into smart watches and I were cost conscious, the SE 2 GPS is amazing too. And you can get an SE 2 pretty cheap right now, even in the 44 mm size.
I didn’t even know that you’d access the SOS feature that way. That has never happened to me, not a single time. Not sure why it’s happening to your wife so easily. Taking a look at how the buttons are presently mapped, I actually see this as a logical improvement.