Schools also have different ways of viewing and classifying a student’s application, and sometimes the less selective institutions aren’t as sophisticated in how information is interpreted.
For example, my kids have run into the issue that our HS doesn’t list a weighted GPA, and some public universities just use “whatever GPA is listed on the HS transcript.” So my kid’s unweighted 3.98 gets compared to another kid’s weighted 4.5, etc. (And some schools even use 4.3 for an A+ which makes even the unweighted GPA go over 4.0.) A more holistic process at a more selective institution would evaluate each GPA in the context of the HS.