> is literally “post death” in Latin

Yes; I think what I described matches that meaning?

Post-death, as in: "it's over," "activity has halted," "no more work being done."

Death does not necessarily have a bad/negative connotation. It's just the end of something.

This is in contrast to the original comment: "something that went so wrong you had to kill it." Death does not imply something went wrong or that it happened forcefully.

I guess "autopsy" generally is talking about "finding the cause of death" so maybe that has a more negative connotation ("something (bad) happened, causing death, let's find it").

Ah, words with their fuzzy meanings (:

Languages change. That word "literally", which you just used, meant one thing for decades (centuries?) ... and now it also (literally) means the exact opposite.

You can be the crabby old guy complaining about how the youth ruined English ... or you can accept that languages aren't immutable, and that the meaning of postmortem is no longer it's literal meaning.

The postmortem for many cows is “how did you like your hamburger” so it isn’t all bad (from the user point of view at least).

> But postmortem is literally “post death” in Latin.

Sure, that's true. It's not really relevant to people who don't speak Latin.

> It’s synonymous with autopsy!

This isn't true. I have no idea how you got here. In English an autopsy is a surgical procedure performed on a corpse for the purpose of identifying the cause of death. In particular, it's a noun. "Post-mortem" in the etymologically literal "after death" sense is an adverb or adjective identifying whatever it is as taking place chronologically after some contextually-specified death.

But, you seem to put some weight on the etymology of a word independently of its current meaning. In that case autopsy "literally means" to witness something personally, as opposed to hearing about it from someone else. (It's "self-eye" in Greek just as post mortem is "after death" in Latin.) Somehow I doubt that's what you had in mind...?