Colleges whose admissions are need-blind for individual applicants can adjust the priority of things like legacy (correlates to less financial need) and first generation (correlates to more financial need) to try to target an overall level of financial need for the entire class. Even things like the relative weighting of HS GPA versus SAT/ACT scores can have an effect. This does not mean directly or indirectly considering whether an individual applicant will individually have high financial need.
But some colleges may not have found their predictions of overall level of financial need to be accurate enough, so they have to be explicitly need-aware to make budget.