It is called rendering. MuPDF, Poppler, PDFjs, and so on. The problem is that you and everyone else thinks "rendering" means bitmaps. That is not how it works.
For me, learning something new is very much worth losing the internet argument!
The advantage of the OCR method is that it effectively performs that visual inspection. That's why it is preferable for PDFs of disparate origin.
I did read your comment, because my intention here is to learn. I already described how tools such as pdftotext do not produce strings when each letter is positioned independently. I even gave an example of a few replies up.