Yes, apart from the web existing in a capitalist society which in turn causes the ad and fad (IA, crypto, VR, etc) problems, a fundamental thing that makes the web worse today is that its usage (way more so than its tech) has evolved from a very solid document distribution system to a somewhat poor a application platform.
Projects like Gemini [1] try to tackle this by reinventing a simpler, document/content focused protocol, but let's be honest it has no chance of really succeeding.
However, I really don't think PDF is the right way. PDF is a horrible format, only good for what it was designed to do: printing to paper. On screen, PDF is incapable of producing free-flowing resizable text for example (and I'll add that nowadays, even for printing PDF is not necessarily the best choice, you can do very advanced clean layout using web tech with Paged.js [2] for example). Plain old simple web formatting like is used in the ePub format is generally more than enough for what would be a PDF.
I would speak to many more people regarding how they read things and you will find outside the tech industry fixed formats are king and there is no sign this is going to ever go away. Academia, education, business and finance included at least in my case.
Bar the GitHub markdown and inevitable confluence in tech, I don’t see this anywhere else. It’s Word, people writing fixed size pages on their iPads and consuming vast amounts of physical documents. In fact when it comes to technical publishing, dynamic layouts almost always fall to pieces.
PDF, or at least the less Adobe subset that falls out of typesetting software, while not ideal is the least bad interchange format we have for this.
The only close thing I see is ebooks but I hear regular complaints appear from people who lose the concept of “page” when using those.
Gemini I am interested in and will research further.
Projects like Gemini [1] try to tackle this by reinventing a simpler, document/content focused protocol, but let's be honest it has no chance of really succeeding.
However, I really don't think PDF is the right way. PDF is a horrible format, only good for what it was designed to do: printing to paper. On screen, PDF is incapable of producing free-flowing resizable text for example (and I'll add that nowadays, even for printing PDF is not necessarily the best choice, you can do very advanced clean layout using web tech with Paged.js [2] for example). Plain old simple web formatting like is used in the ePub format is generally more than enough for what would be a PDF.
[1] https://geminiprotocol.net/
[2] https://pagedjs.org/