What's so hard about PDF text extraction? ​

There is a common view that extracting text from a PDF document should not be too difficult. After all, the text is right there in front of our eyes and humans consume PDF content all the time with great success. Why would it be difficult to automatically extract the text data?

Turns out, much how working with human names is difficult due to numerous edge cases and incorrect assumptions, working with PDFs is difficult due to the extreme flexibility given by the PDF format.