Makes sense. Actually, if you keep the layout/content very simple, aren't constrained by throughput, and don't need to integrate dynamic data or other similar processes, then simple FOSS could indeed get the job done! That's exactly why we developed the open-source library react-print-pdf

I'd literally spin up a PHP container with TCPDF and do caveman math on cell sizes. Making something fancy with it is a lot of work, but it is a steady, incremental work. Doing stuff with HTML+CSS conversion is just frustrating and you'll likely get 90% there then spend most of the time kicking and bashing CSS until it behaves nicely in that obscure case. In TCPDF I was able to make a temporary page, write to it, check the positions, discard that page and arrange the actual content based on that. You can't do that with CSS, good luck guessing how much horizontal space the text takes

There have long been free HTML-PDF options around, but at the same time commercial products that offered more features. Some examples are opening an existing PDF and modifying it, adding to it, merging PDFs, or filling PDF forms.