I do not think that you need saving. I think that you will get into very good universities. They just are unlikely to be ranked in the top 20.
I think that ECs and essays are how “top 20” universities choose from among a very long list of applicants with nearly perfect grades. I do not think that ECs and essays make up for a slightly low GPA at a “top 20” university.
I think that you will be able to get into a very good university. If you do very well in university, and if you want to ever go to graduate school, then the very strongest graduate programs will still be available also if you ever want to consider applying to them. For CS graduate school however is not needed. For the software engineers who I happen to know (and there are a lot of them), very few of them (low single digit) have PhD’s, but a meaningful number of them (still way less than half) have master’s degrees. Of the ones with master’s degrees, most got their master’s degree at a university that is ranked higher compared to where they got their bachelor’s (which implies that they did very well as undergraduate students).
Exactly. Make sure that you apply to safeties. Do as well as you can. Have faith that this will work out.
Lots of us here on CC have experience working in industry. We have worked with people who graduated from Stanford and MIT and U.Mass and San Jose State and UNH and U.Maine and Rutgers and RIT and WPI and Michigan and UCB and a very, very wide range of other universities.
You will do fine, but you need to make sure that you apply to safeties, and your safeties will not be ranked in the top 20 overall nor most likely for CS.