You said "NIST worked together with NSA to allow/insert backdoors into cryptography". It's been pointed out a couple times now that neither NIST nor NSA designed these schemes; they were submitted by the highest-profile academic cryptography research teams in the world. You aren't being asked to trust NIST in any meaningful way.
The closest analog to NIST I can think of is ECRYPT and the eSTREAM contest. It produced interesting work and you could follow it in much the same way people followed these last two NIST competitions. But for PQ KEMs, it's likely that NIST's will be the "competition of record".
The closest analog to NIST I can think of is ECRYPT and the eSTREAM contest. It produced interesting work and you could follow it in much the same way people followed these last two NIST competitions. But for PQ KEMs, it's likely that NIST's will be the "competition of record".