It might be possible to embed that metadata in the target as well. If I were doing this I would copy and paste the text off into some editor that only supports raw text like notepad, then use screenshots of any images, then reassemble them into a "clean" version by hand. I would also probably not ever do this because that's a giant pain.

Potentially, I suppose. But then most people who want a pirated copy of an article are probably looking for something with at least the right pagination – makes citation easier. So it depends on how much effort you're willing to give to that endeavour haha. Anything is better than nothing in a pinch though.

They're allowed to give it to people who ask.

I think that very much depends on what sort of article/chapter, what publisher, and what the nature of the copy the author has is (e.g. preprint, journal published version download, unpublished Word manuscript, etc.) It's hard to make any true generalisations here.