The most important signal in CVE-2026-16766 is not the 9.8 CVSS score — it's the explicit admission that version 0.6.0's fix was incomplete. That characterization tells you the maintainers either didn't understand the full vulnerability surface when they shipped 0.6.0, or they knowingly shipped partial mitigation. Neither scenario is acceptable, and both should make you skeptical that 0.6.1 fully closes the gap.
The abandoned status of wkhtmltopdf makes this worse. The underlying binary will never receive upstream security patches, meaning every remaining attack surface must be closed at the Perl wrapper layer — and the wrapper has already demonstrated it cannot do this reliably. The wrapper exposes wkhtmltopdf's command-line options directly because that is the library's purpose, but those options were designed for human operators, not untrusted web input. You cannot retrofit trust boundaries onto a binary that assumes none exist. This is not a sanitization problem you can solve with better escaping; it's a fundamental API design failure.
What you should do: First, verify whether 0.6.1 addresses all injectable option categories — page size, orientation, margins, headers, footers, and any others — or whether the fix scope matched only what the initial bug report identified. If it's the latter, residual vectors almost certainly remain. Second, audit your application architecture: command injection through this wrapper requires that user-controlled input reaches the option parameters. If your application does not expose wkhtmltopdf options to untrusted users, your risk profile differs significantly from applications that do. The low EPSS score despite a 9.8 CVSS likely reflects this — mass exploitation is difficult because the attack requires a specific, uncommon application pattern.
Third, treat any system that upgraded to 0.6.0 as still vulnerable until you confirm 0.6.1 is deployed. The incomplete fix created a window where patched systems believed they were secure but were not. Fourth, begin planning migration away from this module. The maintainers are fighting this battle alone with no upstream reinforcements coming, and the historical pattern for this vulnerability class — CLI wrappers retrofitted for web use — shows incomplete patches followed by second disclosures for overlooked option types. Assume more CVEs in this lineage will arrive. Budget for refactoring now rather than chasing patches later.