It doesn’t even need to be dripping directly onto the surface. I’ll give you an example: I’ve seen A/C condensate water coming out of the roof drains of a building, and you can see a clear path where the water eroded away the cement, leaving the concrete’s aggregate exposed. I know water can do some impressive things, (Grand Canyon) but how does the water flowing over the surface actually cause erosion? Let’s say the gutter of a roof is allowed to drip onto a concrete surface, how exactly does it wear it away give enough time?
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It’s pretty much mechanical wear. Even though water seems to be flowing into whatever shape it’s on, it still has mass and would “prefer” to keep going the direction it already was.
It physically grinds the other material down, but at a microscopic scale. This happens faster if there’s a rough surface for the water to get caught on, but even if it’s a smooth surface, the physical forces of trillions of water molecules will eventually knock something loose.
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