Everyone should be champion of some lost causes, not because their own have much chance to succeed, simply because otherwise they are all certain to never happen while in the first case, at scale, it’s almost guarantee that some will defeat the odds.

That said, "TFA" is ok, but "the TFA" seems even more extravagant than "PDF format"

PDF format is the same as EXE format or BMP format. They are named for the file extension. And the etymology of the file extension is treated as opaque.