This is true, but if you have Strength then it really ought to have some relationship to damage at least. (Even if only by allowing you to use oversized weapons or something).
It would be possible to have Accuracy independent of Strength (although putting it in Dex is also an Issue - although that could be resolved in some way).
With D&D being the kind of game that it is, being exceptionally big and strong in the fiction really needs to have some kind of concrete affect on the way that you fight. It doesn't have to make the character the best, there can be multiple ways of approaching the issue that are equally effective, but it at least needs to be somewhat distinct. This may be hard to do without extensive real and genuine playtesting, but the game needs to at least be honest about the kind of characters it can do with the priorities it has and the resources it's willing to invest in them.
Also Powerful Build is really just one function. It's carrying capacity - Strength over time, and something an awful lot of games don't even worry about. It doesn't even have an effect on making a Strength roll to move a boulder or overturn a wagon. (It's not a character defining trait, it's a "here's an extra thing.")
Strength as it affects combat is very abstract. No surprise, since D&D combat is abstract.
How a big creature fights is largely narrative, not mechanical. There are probably a few existing mechanics to represent size in combat (the halfling's nimbleness trait, as an example) but not many, and that works for me. In this abstract combat-related capacity, it's easy for me to justify strong halflings -- if they need to be justified.
But like most ability scores, Strength is a mess of abstraction and concreteness, and because of that there is some dissonance in the way we interpret it.
It's easy to see a halfling as equal to or surpassing a goliath in certain Strength (Athletics) checks -- climbing, swimming, breaking free of bonds. (My son when he was four could climb a 25' rope without sweating. Now, he's four times older and nearly four times heavier and he wouldn't be able to pull that off anymore!) Put that halfling into contested Strength checks with a goliath, in a grapple or in arm-wrestling, and credulity gets strained. The advantage/disadvantage mechanic based on size discrepancies might be enough to bridge the gap of expectations there.
I don't even want to talk about jumping. Ugh.
Then there's the flat-out objective measures of Strength, carrying capacity and lifting limits. But even encumbrance is more abstracted than we might notice. Halfling-sized armor and gear weigh the same as the goliath's, so in some sense the halfling isn't really carrying the same weight, no matter what the tally on the character sheet says. For this purpose, I think powerful build covers the size differential well enough. I can't remember the last time it was important in my games to know if a particular halfling could pick up a particular boulder. I can shrug off the apparent incongruities of the push, drag, and lift limits for small characters vs. medium and larger.
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