Bitcoin uses/needs time, in order to introduce the notion of '10 minutes'. Otherwise there is no way to judge the significance of PoW/difficulty.
But this artificial work construct (hashing and difficulty adjustment) acts similar.
1: Given enough difficulty and decentralization, no particular actor has the might to alter or dictate things.
2: Acces to this data is trivial because of the internet.
3: intepreting the data is only as difficult as running a node.
The result is a consensus because it is hard to lie effectively about something on which everyone can come to the same conclusion themselves