Why Pdf is a new religion:
Pdf is complicated.
Pdf is ubiquitous.
Everyone follows their own conventions and calls it a standardised pdf.
Conversion from pdf to any other format is problematic.

Keep adding to the list...

That begs the question: what's the alternative?

@RedPolygon is that a point to the list or is that a real question?

A: There's no alternative sadly.

@RedPolygon DVI comes to mind.

@A4Abhiraj It was a real question lol

@ilPinguino But is it a better choice?

Once, I had to work on a project that had a functional requirement for being able to extract data from PDF. What a fucking nightmare.

@telephantasm I work at a company where the first process of our data pipeline is extracting from PDFs. I also happen to live in a third world country and the amount of variations I have to deal with is humongous.

@lukegv But at some point, someone will want that. And they don't care about it being the wrong use case.

At some point, HTTP was meant to transfer basic formatted text. Now, we build complex applications that completely abuse this protocol.

SMTP was meant to be a simple "I'll leave you a message" type application, now it's the worlds possibly largest cybercrime vector.

SSH was meant to be a remote administration tool, now it's your go-to for anything to do with secure remote access - shells, applications, file transfers, file systems...

And don't get me started about the hacks applied by video game developers (or hackers).

I once built an arduino countdown timer with a regular int as the counter (my use case was an hour, the counter ran in seconds - no big issue) and shared it on a tutorial. Someone told me they almost killed themselves (I don't know details and I didn't ask) by using it to count down several days.

People will repurpose things in ways you've never foreseen.

@ilPinguino You, sir, have won my heart !