alt Hacker NewsThe argument from Roberto Avanzi is reasonable: "as a codesigner of ML-KEM myself I would not trust using it exclusively: what if it gets broken mathematically and in the classical computational model (I.e. non-quantum)? Hybrid is better, and the additional time used by ECC is not significant."
A majority (but not a large majority) of cryptography engineers would use hybrids at this point, and hybrids are largely the default design for any mainstream deployment. Bernstein argument isn't "use hybrids, not pure MLKEM"; it's "MLKEM is so dangerous there shouldn't even be an informational standard saying how to use it". That's a problem, because there are non-mainstream deployment environments where you can't use hybrids.
Obviously, Bernstein is counting on you not following that level of nuance; he'd much rather you believe he's arguing for hybrids against people who are trying to exterminate hybrids.
For clarity: I am not a cryptographer; I'm a vulnerability researcher who does some cryptography work and for several reasons I talk to a lot of academic cryptographers and cryptography engineers. You could not pay me to design a PQC transport protocol for you.