I would argue that PDF is nightmarishly bad - truly one of the worst formats ever created on almost all fronts - but it's the best and most featured option for its use case. Depressingly, I find this is true about a lot of things. I don't know what the answer is.
I’ve met a few people who feel passionately the way you do, and don’t get it.
I worked with archivists on a few projects and never appreciated the dumpster fire that electronic documents presented.
PDF is an amazing thing as you get an expressive format that preserves look, feel and content and will likely do so for the foreseeable future. Just the fact that the US Federal courts standardized on PDF for most filings will ensure that it is a viable format for decades or more.
Problem is that PDF does not preserve content in a machine readable format. It’s a one way street. Once converted to PDF you can’t convert to another format without losing a lot of content and formatting.
One thing doesn't imply the other. The format could be machine readable and still be pixel-perfect consistent. It could also allow reflowing, adjusting the kerning, or use system fonts even if it's machine unreadable.
It is machine readable, just not readily machine malleable.
I worked on a project where we were digitizing and cataloging various records. It was less challenging to do this with papers from the British colonial administration from the late 1700s, than to decipher certain 1980s documents written with a defunct word processor. PDF is a compromise that helps address that issue.
I would not recommend maintaining your general ledger in a PDF. But an annual report that may be referenced for decades is a great example of why a PDF is a useful format.
