I would expect so simply because browsers are fairly hardened pieces of software. Adobe Acrobat is decently hardened but it seems to be far behind browsers.
It is worth noting that Chromium and later Firefox both added PDF viewers that live inside the browser sandbox. They are essentially web-apps that render the PDF. When I worked at Google they strongly recommended using Chrome for opening PDF files because they felt much more comfortable about its security and sandboxing than other PDF readers.
On another perspective is that you are likely browsing the internet anyways. In fact you likely got the PDF by visiting a website. So you have already exposed a huge attack surface (your browser) to a possible hostile adversary. It is better to expose them to the same attack surface again (plus whatever security the PDF reader itself provides) than to give them a fresh new attack surface.
