Photopea made a mistake, and now they are paying for it.
They can fight, but it's a losing battle.
I think that the differentiating factor must be something else than the software product feature. Because that can easily be copied or recreated.
It can be e.g. the customer support where customers will be listened to and will have their suggestions and requests implemented as features.
Do you have any concrete ideas for how to do this or are you just saying this to defend piracy?
I say that as someone who thinks about this almost every day.
No one implied that the author should offer their product for free. I merely suggested that they need to focus on other aspect of their product rather than the mechanical software parts because they can no longer be the differentiating factor. Precisely because they could easily be recreated or copied.
> take the Javascript code from my website, remove all ads from it
I would assume that this might be one of the reasons why people are modifying and repackaging your product. I would suggest to remove that incentive. So that the people will have no reason to repackage your product because it has annoying features. And so that they could use it directly and be happy about it.