I'm not so interested in the detailed discussion later on in this thread to be honest. Let me propose a simple solution that should make everyone happy:

1. We drop pdf builds in CI, the release process and the Docker image, but keep support in the code base.

2. Rohit volunteered to maintain the pdf build, so if he (or another person we know and trust to receive artifacts from and distribute them) wants to send PRs to fix doc build issues and merge a pdf build into https://github.com/numpy/doc/, we'll review and merge those.