What's a more modern way to control an internal combustion engine + forced induction (turbo charger) than PID?
The main idea is that control problems can be posed as optimization problems where we try to achieve some goal (financial / stability etc) while satisfying some hard restrictions.
For example try to change lines gracefully and fast on the highway without crashing on another car.
For your particular case, if you want something dirt cheap (computationally) and reliable then the PID is a great first step.