The watermark is quite pitiful

Thgere are websites that remove the Adobe and Shutterstock watermarks on the fly. 

Some customers are debating for no watermark. When you present your potential mockups to customers, you alwasy need to add lengthy explanations for why this watermark is present. And yes, it is easy to get rid of the watermark. But at the end you always have two types of clients: clients ignoring the watermark and clients licensing the asset.

Nobody serious is using low-quality watermarked previews for professional projects.  At worst, they might use it on a social media post, to which I say, "who cares if they do?"

That's not something I'm losing sleep over, neither should you.

Big, dark watermarks that obscure the image will be detrimental to legitimate Buyers who want to be able to see what they're getting. They often download previews to incorporate into a design to present to their client, and the presence of a very noticeable watermark would make it more difficult for the client to appreciate the design. The thumbnail / preview copy that you can download are small files, so not really suitable for commercial use. 

Case in point: I used to work for a company whose CEO was a micromanager who didn't have a creative bone in his body and could not envision how an ad would look if the sample I provided contained watermarks. So he made me remove them so he could see exactly what the ad would look like when sent to the publisher. The watermarks of the stock service we used were quite substantial compared to Adobe's, but I was always able to clean them up. And that was long before generative fill became available. At the time, I only had Content Aware Fill at my disposal, and while less than adequate, and time-consuming, I could clean things up quite well with it. At least enough to pass the CEO's limited imagination.

Short of hiding the asset almost entirely behind heavy-handed watermarks, there is not much to be done, as any Photoshop extraordinaire would be able to remove them with little or no effort. Images that are stolen are almost always discovered eventually., at which time appropriate legal action can be taken, starting with a take-down notice, which is usually quite effective.