I use Evince probably once a week or so from the command line. I do not see that error, though I think I have in the past. I suspect that if you are seeing those issues with the current bookworm release, it is likely a problem local to you.
You could be missing a package that evince expects to be there, but there is a missing dependency (likely, making it a Debian problem). You could have configured something some time ago that no longer makes sense, either Gnome based as a whole, something local to Evince, etc, or a cache corruption (which makes it a local issue which could be a challenge to track down). Or a good old fashioned bug somewhere along the line (perhaps making it a Gnome/Evince bug). One URL from the man page, http://www.gnome.org/projects/evince/, seems to go through a series of JavaScript based redirects to end up at https://apps.gnome.org. That does give a GitLab based 404 error. I'm not sure if that is the "throws an error" situation you were referring to or not. Possibly related, https://circle.gnome.org gives the same 404. Both of those links are listed in the footer of https:///www.gnome.org/. However, there is another site listed in the man page: https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/evince/issues , and that does appear to work. That might be another venue you can try if you want to resolve the issue instead of abandoning Evince. As far as alternatives, I think both current versions of Firefox and Chrome support PDFs natively. Also, before I started using evince, I used to use gv (based on ghostview) quite a bit. The following seems to list most of the various programs discussed in this thread, plus a couple of others: apt-cache search pdf-viewer mrc