I think you're describing stream compression, which appears to be utterly ubiquitous to the point that the knobs to turn it off have either technically bitrotte

I think you're describing stream compression, which appears to be utterly ubiquitous to the point that the knobs to turn it off have either technically bitrotted or faded well below our collective awareness threshold. After poking around a bit I noticed ps2pdf supports a "CompressPages" option (https://web.mit.edu/ghostscript/www/Ps2pdf.htm https://web.mit.edu/ghostscript/www/Ps2pdf.htm), which might be what you're looking for. Alternatively you might use something like `qpdf --stream-data=uncompress input.pdf output.pdf`. qpdf (http://qpdf.sourceforge.net/ http://qpdf.sourceforge.net/) seems to be a good recommendation to add to the "mentally index the entire man page to know what it can do" list for anyone interested in PDF in general.