Besides, it looks very nice, I’m even maybe a bit jealous, it does also sound a bit complicated to create such a design, but this could also be just my lack of skills when it comes to HTML, CSS and PHP.
There is also another approach to modify the custom-pdf.css file which resides in assets/core/css. This just overrides the CSS rules from the InvoicePlane.php file, or at least the related CSS files.
But the possibilities are perhaps more limited than modifying directly, but it has the advantage to not touch the InvoicePlane.php and so it should be resistant against updates.
For the SVG thing, I believe you can’t embed SVG’s directly into PDF’s but if you convert it to a base64 string it does work. That’s the way I did it.