> It just makes CSS easier in one particular aspect, at the expense of others. Like pretty much all tools.
I agree, but what sets PostCSS apart from other tools is its forward compatibility. Which is a reason to opt for it for many people, including me.
At the end of the day most people will benefit from having vanilla CSS knowledge anyway regardless of any layer they prefer to use on top of it. SASS is such a layer as well as Tailwind. PostCSS is just tomorrow's CSS. It is to CSS what Babel is to Javascript. So using PostCSS instead of SASS is comparable to using Babel instead of for example CoffeeScript.
If one deems that tomorrow's CSS as it currently stands is advanced enough to handle "big, engineered stylesheets", then PostCSS may well be all they need. But I don't think there is a single right answer here.