Correction: it’s the producer of PDF software with up-sells baked into it, even if you paid for the full-fat Adobe Acrobat with a perpetual license (which is still a thing, fortunately) you still get steered towards using their Subscription SaaS features like Adobe Sign, Document Cloyd, etc.

Fortunately Adobe’s PDF specification is an open, public standard (a surprisingly altruistic move for a company seemingly ran with the same level of malevolence as if Lucifer got himself an MBA) so now, in 2023, there’s no shortage of high-fidelity PDF viewers and virtual printer drivers. Browser JS-based PDF viewers are the best thing to happen in this area in decades - remember all those Acrobat Reader splash screens in the early-2000s?