alt Hacker NewsPVS isn't that expensive to compute. Especially nowadays. I assume this is actually referring to the binary space partitioning techniques used in DOOM and improved in Quake, Half-Life, etc in the late 90s, early 2000s.
The BSP tree was also extremely useful for optimizing netcode for games like Quake 3 Arena and games within that family and time period I believe.
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PVS requires some hierarchical scene representation with no seams between walls. I know no other way to build such representation other than BSP. But BSP works fine only with pretty low-detail map geometry consisting of brushes. No large detail meshes or terrains can be used with it. If a game has a lot of open spaces or semi-open spaces it's nearly to impossible to build a BSP for it.
Lots of old racing games used a PVS. The way it was calculated was by flying a camera around the track and calculating what was visible every few meters using occlusion culling, then at runtime you just see what section of track you're on and only draw the objects that you know are visible. Recalculating the PVS for that is definitely a slow operation!