Depends on the incentive scheme to stop malicious actors. Current form of "PoW" relies on computational hahsing to stop the attacks.

PoS, an alternative "work" scheme, relies on staking and risk of losing coins to stop bad actors. The person who gets to mine the block is still hashing and creating the block.

Ethereum, as an example, started out with PoW but soon moves to PoS. So, it is trying to avoid a situation like Bitcoin were highpowered hashing (a word coined by Satoshi) and electricity is in focus.