If you don't think it's clear that the author's advocacy of PDF is a means to an end, subservient to their desire to dismantle surveillance capitalism and the duopoly that Google/Apple have on the web, I don't know where to go from here.
It's when you trick a technically-minded person into jumping down a rabbit hole of a technical problem/controversy. Here it's PDF vs. HTML, but other classic nerd snipes are UTF-8 vs. anything else, "fixing" election tech, etc.