I'm a fan of explaining dark matter with such objects.
Not WIMPs but MACHOs.
Not WIMPs but MACHOs.
You can read this even at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Massive_compact_halo_object
I believe that I most recently heard it from Lina Necib's appearance on Sean Carroll's podcast ... that would be this episode: https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/podcast/2020/05/11/96-l...
Recommended, if you go for that sort of thing.
[Edited to add: OK, turns out the consensus is unstable. There appears to be a window of BH mass range which has not been observationally excluded. See, e.g.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Primordial_black_hole#Theoreti...]
And here's the relevant part. It's fair to say that Necib is not very bullish on BH's being the explanation for dark matter.
(SC = Sean Carroll of Caltech, LN = Lina Necib, then at Caltech, now on faculty at MIT)
SC: But it could be black holes, right?
LN: Yes it could be primordial black holes. There has been a lot of work, especially recently, on trying to understand what is the possibility or what is the parameter space so if the theory of primordial black holes explaining dark matter is still possible, there is some disagreement within the community of how much of it is ruled out. The theory is not completely ruled out but quite a few chunks of it are. It depends on the measurements and there are some very small windows for example. I think 15 to 30 solar masses is still possible, something like that so it is not a completely ruled out theory.
...
SC: [...] Black holes, you seem to be saying, if I can summarize it - if there is some mechanism for making black holes early on, they could be some of the dark matter but it’s hard to make them be all of it. Is that fair?
LN: That’s right, yes. It’s much more difficult to make them pure, to make them all completely the dark matter. It could be a small fraction, that has not been ruled out, yes.
However Hawking Radiation is a testable prediction of a theory that has yet to be tested. I dislike that physicists tend not to speak of Hawking Radiation in such terms since it is not a fact.
In particular, I would argue that the Black Hole Information paradox isn't a paradox, it's an evidence against Hawking Radiation which in turn pushes back on quantum mechanics. Most of dark matter may very well be explained by small primordial black holes we're not (yet) well equipped to detect.
It took us to the space age to start getting a lot of practical observational proof of relativity for example. Now its all confirmed relativity for now but for a lot of these other things we are sorely lacking. Hawking radiation is a good example of that as you pointed out. How do you even get observational data on hawking radiation without the starship Enterprise anyways?
Here's the thing about science: reality doesn't actually owe us elegant or in any way aesthetic explanations of anything. We've gotten so many of them that we've started taking them for granted, started feeling entitled. But it's only a feeling.
That might be because it's easier to dream up and get funding for crazy axion detection equipment ... and there's not much you can do to make more microlensing get observed.