I believe Pacia and some other devs were talking about basing Avalanche participant selection on PoW over the past ~100 blocks so it's still critical for gaining control of the network
Yes and no. Basically the old benefit of 51% is "few confirmations" accommodating a split for a double-spend. With Avalanche, network control can cause a sway. But remains _not_ split.
Just that centralization or any kind of attack would still rely upon gaining a large majority of hashrate on the network. Lots of people were irked by the idea of PoS Bitcoin