Our large suburban high school is excellent. It offers dozens of AP and IB classes for anyone wishing to load up (no restrictions on who or how many), as well as access to unlimited DE options. There is an option for super-accelerated math, allowing students to start earning college credits as early as middle school. It produces dozens of National Merit finalists. Yet we almost never get an unhooked student into Harvard.
But this year we did. It wasn’t one of the top scoring students. It was a nationally awarded poet and short story writer. I have no idea whether this student wrote any of the short stories in a coffee house, however, or worked out any of the poems in their head while strolling, as many poets do. So I can’t speak to your specific concerns on that front.