Yep exactly 
I think it most of time important for users who see the linked word and they unfamiliar with that. These sharing and linking often happen unintentionally on the part of the users, because the system highlights (link) those words after the post is published. So the user does not necessarily intend to notify the author. They actually just posting a thing that may help. In my opinion, one of the main potentials of watched words is that it is not actually necessary to mention the author always or link the post in which it is written down in detail.
One more important thing is that these words are usually popular terms that it is good for everyone to be aware of. So even newly joined members can easily find them and thus understand the conversations more easily and can join to the conversation. So the goal with these are rather to set the members on the right path and if they have more questions in this regard, they will receive them on the linked post. Which makes these notifications unnecessary for the post author.
The workaround changing post ownership to system is not an option in our case because this is mostly the blog authors work so it’s important for us to keep these posts, topics to the author.