There was lots of public scrutiny of Kyber (ML-KEM); DJB made his own submission to the NIST PQC standardization process. A purposely introduced backdoor in Kyber makes absolutely no sense; it was submitted by 11 respected cryptographers, and analyzed by hundreds of people over the course of standardization.

I disagree that ML-KEM is "obviously weaker". In some ways, lattice-based cryptography has stronger hardness foundations than RSA and EC (specifically, average -> worst case reductions).

ML-KEM and EC are definitely complementary, and I would probably only deploy hybrids in the near future, but I don't begrudge others who wish to do pure ML-KEM.