i work in printing which is 90% pdf manipulation using various software but acrobat pro is one.  pdfs by no means are "flattened" which basically just means rasterized into pixels by default. if they were you couldn't actually edit the individual layers in any software, acrobat included. most imaging software has settings where you can adjust what you want to include in the pdf but it's very malleable. also, whatever "optimization tool" you're talking about just doesn't exist. it definitely didn't exist in 2008 or whatever when this was first identified as an issue. in order to do what you're claiming, acrobat would have to be able to determine the difference between specific arrangements of font symbols like "date." how would it know to separate a date field in 2008? we can only just now use ai models to more confidently have computers read and understand pdfs. not only that, but some lines are also separated, and some signatures are not. why wouldn't the software treat every piece of text the same? and last but not least acrobat would have to be able to fill the background behind the text. prior to generative ai tools, this has to be done by clone stamping and manually painting the background or taking an average of all surrounding pixels together and blurring them in a region. acrobat doesn't have the functionality on its own for either of those things. in fact, in the print industry we use an extension to acrobat called "pitstop" that lets add shapes, change colors, add bleed, tile or layout objects etc. all that to say you're retarded and full of shit.
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