Apple Watch UNUSABLE due to CONTINUOUS SYNCING

To troubleshoot I've switched syncing off for everything I've found out how to for that I don't want synced. I want no more than a few things synced, including Nike Run Club runs.

Voice Memos iCloud sync somehow turned back on in my iPhone after pairing the devices, and even temporarily disappeared as an option at Settings > Apple ID > iCloud, although it's reappeared now so I've disabled it. That was hundreds of MB so I'm wondering if the long sync time was partly due to that. It's too bad there isn't a way to select what to sync before or while pairing devices.

This time after turning on my

watch, the sync loop didn't occur. I hope the loop doesn't reoccur and even if it syncs again without looping I don't want it to waste time syncing stuff I won't use the watch for, so I'm wondering if I can do better.

For example, Messages, Mail and Photos - how do I disable these? I think I've effectively disabled photo syncing (mapped it with an always-empty album), but is there a way to actually disable it? For Mail the best I've found is to only enable sync of an always-empty mailbox, but is there a way to remove the Mail account from my watch? Perhaps most importantly, is there any way to disable syncing of Messages on my watch without turning off iCloud sync of Messages on my phone? Because like with Voice Memos, that's a lot of MB there.

It's surprising if there isn't a way to select what you want synced on your watch as is possible with Macs/etc. The watch is much more limited in space and speed so the ability to fine-tune what goes on and what stays off is far more important.

Sent feedback to Apple, meanwhile looking for workarounds/fixes to the issues described 2 paragraphs above regarding Messages/Mail/Photos/etc.