Redaction if only drawing a box over content would not be redaction, I believe that even resulted in some information leakage in the past.

PDFs can be edited, unless they are just embedded images but even then it’s possible.

The selling point of PDFs is “word” documents that get correctly displayed everywhere, ie they are a distribution mechanism. If you want access to the underlying data that should be provided separately as CSV or some other format.

PDFs are for humans not computers. I know the argument you are making is that is not what happens in reality and I sympathise, but the problem isn’t with PDFs but with their users and you can’t fix a management problem with technical.