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.