honestly this would be better with an AI model
Of course it'd be better than something that is intentionally limiting itself. But that says nothing.
In the article the author tried Tesseract which uses ML and has some neural network models, and also tried ChatGPT.
I have come to the same conclusion as the author when doing OCR that needed 100% accuracy.
When you know the font, spacing and the layout is fixed, old school statistical analysis of the pixels works a treat.
It's a bit more effort to set up since you actually have to set it up. But at least it's done right.