Am I overreacting for being annoyed that another web designer basically copied my work and took credit for it?

I don't even know if this is the right place to post this, but I need some outside opinions because this one has me a little heated…

I'm a website designer and marketer, and early last year I built a website for a local organization. Today, I happened to visit their website and discovered they'd had it completely "rebuilt" by another business.

And when I say rebuilt, I mean I still have access to the original site I built. They didn't just update the site I already made, the person that made the new site built it completely separate and transferred the domain.

The more I clicked around, the more things started looking VERY familiar.

Turns out, this other designer reused a TON of my original work. We're talking layouts, page structures, and entire sections of website copy.

Not similar. Literally copied and pasted.

It's the year of our Lord in 2026. AI is EVERYWHERE. If they want to rebuilt the site, why couldn't they throw the text into ChatGPT and ask it to reword a few sentences or use a template to restructure it at least a little bit?!

And of course there is a nice little tag with the new designers business at the bottom where my tag once was…

For context, I maintained this organization's website until around March or April, when they informed me they'd be taking everything in-house. I might have been naive but I didn't think there was any bad blood or any issues with my original website since they never mentioned anything to me about it. And clearly it couldn't have been that bad if they just kept 90% of what I built.

I know that there really isn't a case for copyright infringement because I gave ownership of the site over to this organization once it was completed, so I understand they have the right to reuse the work they paid for. But it wasn't the organization that made the new site… it's another local designer…. seeing this gave me the ick.

I don't update people's work, I rebuild completely. But I feel like if I was asked to do that I wouldn't tag it with my businesses unless at least 75% of the redesign was of my own creation. I think there's a difference between a client reusing something they own and another professional presenting someone else's creative work as their own because they changed the font, a handful of pictures, and the colors… (which also doesn't match their logo at all)

Plus we live in a SMALL community! I guarantee I will be running into the people that hired me around town.

I guess it was just pretty jarring to see another 'business' give my original work the full Temu treatment; Copy the original, lower the quality, and slap a new brand name on it.

So, am I overreacting and just being way to possessive over something that I no longer have control over? Is this just a normal part of being a web designer and to just let it go? Or is it reasonable to be irritated that another professional is putting their name on something they really didn't actually create?

I've attached some side-by-side examples so you can see what I'm talking about.

MINE

THEIRS