I’ve never once heard of anyone reading pdfs for non academic reasons.
Do you know anyone who works?
Not with pdfs
I do. My office works with PDFs all the time. In fact, I’ve become quite adept at mucking about with them.
But anyone who uses PDFs for reading text-only eBooks, whether reading them directly or converting to ePub/MOBI/AZW3 from them, is making a horrible mistake. The primary purpose of PDF is to ensure that the layout on the screen is precisely what will appear when printed on paper.
Using PDF for text that should be reflowable (ie. adjusts when the margins or font size is changed) is several kinds of awful. Kovid Goyal, the lead developer of the Calibre eBook Management software, has complained at length about how the problems Calibre has with converting from PDF are directly related to the super clunky way text in PDFs is coded.
https://manual.calibre-ebook.com/conversion.html#convert-pdf-documents