My apple watch digital crown just fell off

I bought the Apple Watch series 4 in June and I was perfectly happy with it, until the digital crown casing just fell off a couple of months later. I wore my watch in the morning, went to work and later on when I wanted to do something, I just noticed that the digital crown was not there anymore. I didn't knock it and it didn't get caught on anything, it just went missing, and I was not able to find it. I took my watch to the authorised Apple service in Greece where I live and they said they had never seen anything like that, so they sent the watch to the European Service Provider (in Holland I think). In the end they said that this was not covered by the warranty as the crown casing was missing, and the warranty would cover a non functioning crown only, not one that was missing. The watch is still working fine, but I cannot do all the functions that involve the crown, such as setting an alarm or unlocking the watch after a swim, so basically it's pretty useless. And apparently there is no way of replacing or repairing a missing crown, so they said I would have to buy a new one!!! Such a waste of money that I wouldn't want to repeat anyway, so I was wondering if you ever had a similar issue and what did you do about it.