In addition to signing documents with Preview, MacOS/Linux/Windows can all print to pdf / pdf/a, and the Notes app on iOS includes a camera-based document scanner that exports to OCR’ed PDF.
I’ve been making PDFs with LaTeX, for decades, but those other tools are more mainstream, and work fine. I can’t imagine why anyone would pay for acrobat these days.
I'd be curious to hear what Preview messed up?
For my work, it was the highly detailed low level stuff. Pre-flight checks/profiles, content tree (object level, including text fragment) browsing, flattening, converting, transforming versions, and so on. It was indispensable for some of those operations, working in a printing business where clients would sometimes send in their own problematic PDFs which we'd need to adjust or inspect to find the error.
(Favourite one: a font was embedded in a PDF that mapped a character using // in its name, which was "fine" on PDF, but on the printer's RIP was converted to postscript for one step, and // in postscript precedes an immediately evaluated name so it stopped parsing and tried to look for it and bombed out)
I also wish Microsoft would pull its head out of its rear and make a preview clone for windows because that app basically supplants acrobat for basic use.
I uses Apple Preview a lot because it lets me edit and sign documents pretty easily, and that came bundled with my Mac. What does the Acrobat Pro include that isn't in the free stuff?