I think that you may be making unwarranted assumptions. Even before COVID, test scores were not a major factor at “top” colleges, compared to GPA, rigor, and almost everything else.
Students aren’t being selected by a pairwise comparison, so such a scenario, in which they have two identical profiles, and the only difference between them is that one has an SAT and the other doesn’t, and they can only select one of them, is a more or less imaginary situation.
An SAT helps build a profile of a person as academically strong. An applicant like the OP doesn’t need an SAT to support that.