This strategy doesn't make any sense to me. As the article points out, many (most?) recruiter software platforms aren't going to show a human your original Word or PDF file. They're first going to show a human the contents that were extracted from your resume, and converted into the same canonical format as all other candidates.

In that scenario, your Lorem Ipsum-esque paragraph of buzzwords will stand out like a sore thumb with the font taken out of the equation. Using invisible metadata for SEO is only effective when it truly stays invisible.

On this note. Do I even need a resume in Word? Can I just make a plain text resume and expect it will be parsed all to hell before anyone sees it anyway?

I never used Word for resumes, and turned down hiring departments and recruiters that asked for my resume in Word format. I don't even have any Microsoft products on a personal machine.

I only do PDF or plain text if PDF is a problem.

It is actually possible to have create a "word" document using libreoffice

I would still have to redo the whole thing in LibreOffice, and I don't wish to.

It's also a terrible format because I want to control the layout with precision and ensure it renders on the other end exactly as I intended it to.

How did you produce the PDF without Word or LibreOffice?