Some of us aren’t so lucky. Any time I mention prepress, everyone in the front office goes crosseyed and stops listening. So, I just add it in automatically now as part of my quote. on EVERYTHING 
I’ve often found that when I’ve opened PDF files in Illustrator because I needed a single part from that file, sometimes 100 masks or more have gotten in the way.
I am glad that this is no longer one of my problems since I switched to Affinity.
Opened PDFs with Affinity Designer and Publisher feel almost as if they were the original design software data.
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Why do people use masks in Illustrator?
They don’t want others to find out who created that crap, of course!
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This is how it works in Illustrator as well, if the user selects “Illustrator compatibility” option in the pdf save/creation dialog (job options dialog).
The resulting files open in illustrator just like a native file, because the illustrator data is duplicated and embedded within the PDF. Illustrator looks for that first, and opens that if present. If not, you get the junk with seemingly infinite nested masks.
Those illustrator-compatible PDF’s unfortunately tend to be significantly larger in file size, especially for dimensionally large, high-res image-heavy files.
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Yes, I can vaguely remember that. In Affinity, this also works without this step with all PDFs.