I think you recognize this already, but to add a bit of color, in highly regulated industries (e.g. financial services) and B2B settings with lots of peers (e.g. supply chain), "going back to the source document or database or whatever" requires an insane amount of consensus (which is not currently incentivized).
To add to that, a lot of PDFs (e.g. financial reports) are generated procedurally with ancient code that would have to be rewritten to generate a different format. The underlying database format is often many layers of abstraction different than the final output.
To add to that, a lot of PDFs (e.g. financial reports) are generated procedurally with ancient code that would have to be rewritten to generate a different format. The underlying database format is often many layers of abstraction different than the final output.