None of this makes any sense once you understand that NSA had no hand in designing MLKEM, or in shaping the LWE research that led to it. NSA designed Dual-EC. MLKEM won an open competition; its entrants are among the most reputable cryptographers in the world.

it's worth clarifying that its entrants were all qualified, and 2 other essentially identical schemes, namely New Hope and Saber, made it very deep into the NIST competition.

All 3 (roughly) took the approach of

1. take the obvious best design, and

2. tweak various internal design knobs you have access to, and

3. that's pretty much it.

So they differ in the internal design knobs they chose. But the fact that 3 independent teams all created something substantially similar to ML-KEM should be an indication of how much harder it would be for the NSA to be behind it.

Post selection is also design. Evolution by natural (or artificial, for that matter) selection works by post-selection.

I'm happy to agree that it affords much less degrees of freedom than original design, but the irrelevance argument depends on no influence rather than a lack of absolute influence.