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.
It's a great WORM format. Every added feature makes it worse.
There are great systems for those already.
When I want a PDF, it's because I want a format that I know is always going to look the same.
A PDF is a great archive format. It's perfect for a scan of a document, or a printout.
I never want my viewer to add anything to it, I never want it to detect anything, I never want it to adjust anything.
Just render it exactly the same way, every time.
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.
PDFs are often display focused and difficult to parse, but it’s certainly possible to do so.
It’s success in the market as compared to a edit focused format like ODF underlined how important display consistency is.