Fully agree. I think I know the hidden reason though:

• PDFs are a nightmare to parse
  • Virtually every PDF parser out there attempts to parse them visually which typically leads to poor and inconsistent results.
• HTML, JSON, YAML, Markdown, CSVs, heck even TXT
  • can be mechanically and deterministically parsed easily

I have ADHD. I pretty much have to automate as much of my life as possible to get by. But as you point out, almost no proprietary service allows you to export/download your data in a format that makes it easy to use for integration/automation purposes. It very much upsets me that I can’t easily locally process my:

• bank data
• paystubs
• receipts
• shifts at work
• healthcare data
• etc ad nauseam

I think their reasons for this are that they don’t want it to be easy. The harder they make it, the more reason you have to exclusively look at this data in their app/website. Asshole move if you ask me, as the quickest way forward is usually brute force manual data entry.