As long as we're speaking in idealistic terms I pretty much agree with you but when you compare websites and PDFs that exist in practice it tells a different story.
Zooming PDFs on mobile can be a pain but it's certainly less of a pain than using some fixed width site from the early 2000s with a jQuery menu you can only operate with a mouse and links so small that a mouse would fat finger them.
Machine consumption of the documents is one of those benefits that sounds cool but really just boils down to SEO because very few other things are going to be scraping your site. Certainly worth something but it's usually not high on the priority list for governments and search bots scrape PDFs anyway.
I think the main point in favor of the web is that you can have multiple presentation layers for the same underlying content and you can improve presentation independently of content. Not necessarily that it's reusable because that's just templates and a style guide but that you can backport all your fixes.
Zooming PDFs on mobile can be a pain but it's certainly less of a pain than using some fixed width site from the early 2000s with a jQuery menu you can only operate with a mouse and links so small that a mouse would fat finger them.
Machine consumption of the documents is one of those benefits that sounds cool but really just boils down to SEO because very few other things are going to be scraping your site. Certainly worth something but it's usually not high on the priority list for governments and search bots scrape PDFs anyway.
I think the main point in favor of the web is that you can have multiple presentation layers for the same underlying content and you can improve presentation independently of content. Not necessarily that it's reusable because that's just templates and a style guide but that you can backport all your fixes.