Xfinity automatic management picks most congested channel

Hi.  My wifi modem (model CGM4981COM v2) comes with the unfortunate inability to manually configure most settings.  These are automagically "optimized".

Recently I've been getting quite a few dropped connections when using my laptop that require turning the wifi off and on again to resolve.

My first suspicion was wifi congestion as I live in an apartment building where most other people are also using wifi.

The laptop connects on 5G channel 44.  Xfinity's wifi spectrum analyzer built into the access point shows 10 different access points using this channel.  Meanwhile channel 40 has 1 access point using it, and channels 36 and 48 are completely unused (as are most of the higher channels).  

Why does the xfinity automatic configuration choose the most congested channel while ignoring the empty channels?  Or is it just lazy coding and everything defaults to channel 44?  I've tried using the wifi assistant to change this, but it asks meaningless questions such as "Can you now connect to the website" which doesn't make sense in the context of intermittent dropouts.