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 TSV is
TSV is CSV with tabs instead of commas. Because tabs almost never appear inside a value, quoting is rarely needed and the files are easier to read by eye.
Bioinformatics, log processing, and anyone who has copied a block of cells out of a spreadsheet: the clipboard format is TSV.
What changes when you convert PDF to TSV
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.
Pick TSV over CSV when your values contain commas. Pasting the result straight into a spreadsheet fills the cells correctly with no import dialog.
What carries over from PDF to TSV
PDF records 2 things about a table that TSV has no way to hold.
A line break inside a cell ends the row in TSV, so line breaks are replaced rather than carried through.
Anything visual in the PDF - weight, alignment, colour, column widths - has no counterpart in TSV and is dropped. The values are what survives.
The result can be read a record at a time, and appended to by adding to the end of it. That is worth having for a table too large to hold in memory, and it means a TSV file that is cut off part way through still gives you every record before the cut.
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.