ha that’s a fun bug and first time i’ve seen it reported and experienced it myself.
I think it’s an issue with mac os preview rather than the pdf - the same issue is present when doing “print to pdf” in chrome. It works fine in adobe acrobat.
I just tried printing to pdf from chrome with bbc.com and that text actually does copy in the right direction, so there must be some combination of css settings that will make this work…