how do legacies get rejected at boarding schools?

Do legacies ever get an explicit rejection? Don’t they just get a “soft rejection”, i.e. a WL from which they never get pulled off.

Not a legacy situation, but a sibling situation.
Prior to M10, we got a courtesy early notification from S1’s school about S2 being WL.

We had a laugh when we got the WL notice. S2 sent the wrong essay to S1’s school, expressing how he was looking forward to being at Wrong School name.