To hide the fact he's violating Amphenol ICC's copyright by using their images and stripping their copyright notice and publishing info off of them.

If someone wants to copy and paste his article, they’ll at least have to go to the effort of finding the images themselves

But it clearly suggests it's his work. It isn't. Let the original author worry about how he protects his own work.

I understand where you’re coming from, but just finding things can be a lot of effort. If someone wants the images with no watermark, they can look them up

Oh, so I can go to your blog or science article with those nice, detailed posts, take all the photos you made yourself and then make a shitty article on the Internet including your hard work. I will just in case slam my own watermark, so it will look like I did it myself and will not include you as an author.

Apparently this sounds fair to you!

You're posting this on a site where the admin encourages users to post archive links to bypass paywalls. Wrong place for arguments that content creators get their fair share.