What PDF is
PDF describes a page: glyphs at coordinates, not rows and columns. A table in a PDF is a visual arrangement, not a data structure.
Reports, invoices, statements and anything sent to be read rather than processed.
What Jira is
Jira wiki markup uses double pipes for header cells and single pipes for data cells.
Jira issues, comments and descriptions.
What changes when you convert PDF to Jira
Every character in a text-based PDF carries its position on the page. Characters sharing a baseline are one row. Columns are found from the vertical strips no character ever occupies, which is why extraction works cleanly on a document laid out with spacing and badly on one laid out with ruled lines. A header repeated at the top of each page is detected and dropped rather than landing in the middle of the data.
Empty cells are filled with a single space, because a Jira row with two adjacent pipes collapses the column and shifts everything after it.
What carries over from PDF to Jira
PDF records 2 things about a table that Jira has no way to hold.
A line break inside a cell ends the row in Jira, so line breaks are replaced rather than carried through.
Jira marks its header cells differently from its data cells, so the first row is written with that marker.
Anything visual in the PDF - weight, alignment, colour, column widths - has no counterpart in Jira and is dropped. The values are what survives.
This is the direction that recovers structure: PDF has no table in it to read, only an arrangement that looks like one, so the rows and columns are inferred rather than read.