It's founder, John Warnock (co-founder of Adobe), prototyped a compatibility layer where documents would look and, most importantly, print (!) the same regardless of the computer they were viewed on (1993 video). This is the PDF.
The "killer app" for PDF was tax returns - the IRS adopted PDF in 1996 because of a rumored frustration with the US Postal Service.
Things that lack:
Enterprise-grade OCR for PDF documents still doesn't exist in 2022, albeit having state-of-the-art computer vision techniques.
Interactive and web-enabled forms. Sometimes it saves without the data filled in