Not only are you being rude by implying the article went unread, you’re also showing an astounding lack of imagination (perhaps stifled by a need to point out the errors of others). Parent is saying that despite whatever parts of the law you care to snarkily quote, government employees will find a way to screw it up.

This policy exists in many states. But plenty of local reporters have tales about how officials respond with PDFs because they either don't realize that the PDFs are generated from a (legacy) system that could output XLS/CSV, or because they fear that Excel sheets/text files are alterable. The benefit of having the law, though, makes it easier to convince officials to tell their IT people to get it right, under threat of lawsuit.

Scanned pdf of a spreadsheet is clearly machine-readable, as you can read this document with your computer.

I'm pretty sure that isn't what machine-readable means, especially in this context. But this kind of obtuse reading seems like it would be exactly how the concern of the parent comment would come into being.

If you have this kind of standard then literally everything is machine-readable, even handwriting with proper machine learning models. That's quite clearly not the spirit of the wording.