The thinking behind attaching a PDF with colors and not a Genbank file is why we can't have nice things in biotechnology.

Exactly. FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and Reusable) principles are at a loss here [1]. The "Reusable" part seems to be especially problematic as the sequence is buried in a PDF file though all aspects of FAIR are compromised here. Edit: It looks like there is now a PR to address this issue [2]

[1] https://www.nature.com/articles/sdata201618

[2] https://github.com/NAalytics/Assemblies-of-putative-SARS-CoV...