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I could not disagree more, I love this change from the source material.
In order to have that version work everything after her perception gets rewired functionally makes her a zombie, unable to perform basic actions like suggesting her daughter not go rock climbing today, because she has seen the future and is unable to change it. She is functionally a prisoner inside her own life as she is forced to read from a script. Her take away is to relish the good times and try to remember every detail of them since she can relive those moments ad nauseum, which is a lovely take away from what is essentially a nonsensical horror story ending.
In the movie she sees potential future but retains some agency. Which the science works less well than in the book, it avoids the question of what exactly is forcing her to act out the script and instead focuses on the question of if she believes the good times with her husband and daughter are worth the bad. This is a more beautiful and meaningful ending IMHO, it gives her suffering meaning because she went into it with both eyes open in order to grab onto the good that comes with it instead of her being locked in her head screaming that she wants to pick up the phone and tell her daughter to do anything else today OTHER than rock climb but being unable to do so because she is locked out of agency by 4th dimensional vision.
That worked fine for Doctor Manhattan because part of his story was that the 4th dimensional vision and associated super powers altered him so much he was no longer meaningfully human, and I really liked those parts of Watchmen. But they explained it better and worked with it better.
I got the Ted Chiang Short story collection this story is from, and frankly I found The Story of Your Life (the one Arrival is based on) to be the best one despite my many problems with it. I was pretty unimpressed by Chiang tbh.
Dr. Manhattan was a Straw Vulcan who thought that there was no difference between a live body and a dead body because they have the same number of particles, yet liked to do scientific experiments on things that had the same number of particles before and after the experiment.
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