PostgreSQL - Base Backups and PITR According to the PostgreSQL documentation for producing Standalone Hot Backups:

These are backups that cannot be used for point-in-time recovery, yet
are typically much faster to backup and restore than pg_dump dumps.

It seems that all that is required to produce these kinds of backups is to use pg_basebackup utility and include the -X option, which essentially includes the required WAL files necessary to start the cluster. Why can't these backups be used for PITR? If I don't start this backup immediately, shouldn't I be able to place it in recovery mode and allow it to restore up to any point after the backup was created?
I agree that the wording is confusing.
A pg_basebackup taken with -X stream can of course be taken as a basis for point-in-time recovery.
I think the assumption here is that you take a pg_basebackup but do not have WAL archiving configured. Then the backup contains just the WAL segments required to recover to the end of the backup and reach a consistent state, but you don't have the WAL required to recover beyond that point.