It's more about the social economics --but if you can find me a tool that supports the PDF export wrongly, I'll fix it myself.
> The market economics are simply not in the favour of people doing extra work,
Most of the tools are open-source. Does Word or any of the closed source tools do a bad job of this? That would be the main stopping point I guess.
It's still super trivial for them to implement, and shaming them will get their PR team evaluating the risk of not implementing such a feature. You just have to be successful at shaming them.
An HTML file also doesn't represent a document on paper, most people writing papers wouldn't switch to a electronic-only format at the moment--each page is carefully typeset and designed, HTML is not at this level even today.
Knuth is one of the most perfectionist computer scientists out there, and he still got it wrong.
The market economics are simply not in the favour of people doing extra work, and no amount of shaming will get that to change.
The alternative needs to be designed with accessibility builtin, and with decidability/markup as a conscious design choice.
We have such a format, HTML. The chances to get academics to use HTML with the coming open access wave are much better than getting them to rewrite all of their TeX templates.