Speaking just for myself, I definitely never intend to discourage kids, but I often find myself trying to encourage them to maybe rethink what excites them.
Like, you have really good grades and a high test score. You can try to use those credentials to get into, say, the college highest-ranked by the US News, most popular with your peers, or so on. But to me, those are not particularly worthy goals, and also are the least promising use of such credentials because so many other kids with really good credentials are doing the exact same thing.
So, alternatives can include using your good credentials to get multiple offers from colleges that are really a great fit for you in particular, and then you can pick your absolute favorite among those offers. Or you can use them to get competing merit offers. Or some of both. To me, those are inherently more worthy goals, and also don’t necessarily run into that problem of all those similar kids trying to do the exact same thing as you.
I understand that can somewhat sound like I am saying you couldn’t be successful in competing against those kids for the highly-ranked/very-popular colleges, and of course I don’t know that to be true. But almost always, your qualifications will be good enough to apply to colleges that are still quite unlikely to admit you. Which sounds like a paradox but it is the nature of holistic review admissions.
And yes, maybe reported admissions rates will come back up a bit if International applications are seriously discouraged. But I think reported admissions rates were really overstating the competitiveness of admissions for qualified domestic students to begin with. Like, I still think the “real” admissions rate for qualified domestic students at even very selective colleges is more like 15-20%, once you take all the not-actually-qualified applicants out of the pool.
But 15-20% is not high anyway! And the probabilities are correlated, so applying to multiple only raises your total probability a bit and then it levels off.
So I still think a solid majority of even well-qualified domestic applicants will not get into any of their Reaches in upcoming cycles. And that is OK. Because again there are so many other ways to use your qualifications to benefit yourself, and I really do mean to be encouraging about that. To me it isn’t some lessor substitute for getting into one of those colleges everyone else wants to get into, it can actually be better than that anyway.