I posit the reason it sucks is because the Chrome team doesn't care (at least not enough) about the print feature. Firefox is a little better. But I haven't seen decent printing since the days of Internet Explorer.
Some of the most annoying culprits are website terms of service where printing to PDF produces page breaks in places that cut off lines of text.
I do a lot of teaching, and for many reasons share PDFs of articles in addition to the web pages and URLs. I know how to work around these things, but lots of reasons to print and article and what are normal folks supposed to do? Hell, sometimes I don't even notice until the cut is buried in the middle of the long document...
For some reason, the print command works much better in the Vivaldi browser. It frequently renders correctly pages that are garbled by Firefox and Chrome. Moreover, its print command also works many times faster. Thus even if I usually browse with Firefox, when I want to save a page I frequently reopen it in Vivaldi, in order to print it from there. Unfortunately, not even Vivaldi does it always perfectly.
It is very annoying that the print command does not work in browsers, because nowadays that is the only reliable way to save a Web page. Saving a page with the "Save" command rarely works, especially when attempting to read the saved page offline, because too many pages rely on scripts to generate the displayed content, and those frequently do not work offline or even just inside local files.
If you click through them, you will often notice that they are squeezed into the most inconvenient popups, modal dialogs, and other interstitial windows that are abused for this purpose. They are also insufferably long-winded.
I often try to capture the text of these so-called "legal agreements". I try to shove them into a "Print to PDF" but that fails. So I try to copy-paste them into Google Keep, but that also fails, because Keep has a limit. So then I try to cram them into Google Docs. And it often takes about 15 sweeps with copy/paste and scroll scroll scroll, in order to meaningfully transfer all the content into Docs.
It may come in handy later; for example they will often include some contact information for their privacy or legal department, and sometimes there are opt-out instructions nestled near the end of the Terms of Service. They may also document the steps of a grievance process. If you, as a customer, do not follow their steps for filing a grievance and pursue it according to their policy, they have no obligation to help you. So, if you are a serious user of any service, or it means serious money to you, I encourage you to paste or print those legal Terms by any means necessary.
Of course, they will invariably change the Terms on a whim and with the slightest notice to you, and the game begins all over again. Strange game. Perhaps the smartest move is not to play?