Agreed, but in a recent MBAA podcast, a few craft maltsters were anticipating the issue and suggesting that brewers would likely need to adjust processes to maintain results with this year's barley crop stressors encountered.
As to the ALDC, I was also talking with a local brewer recently whose production brewery does contract brewing for a particularly good local craft lager brewery (to meet demand for its packaged lagers based on its limited production capacity). He said that the craft brewer (Siebel and Weihenstephaner grad) uses the ALDC routinely to turn the lagers into finished beer without extensive bright tank aging and has the contract brewer do the same for him. That got me thinking....
But, yeah, it may be that I am searching for a solution to a problem that doesn't yet exist (for me at least). Even so, it will be interesting to hear about brewers using 2021 malts and whether any barley deficiency issues are noticed.