I’m no expert, but I would guess the only exception to this rule is if you are an unusual applicant from a highly unusual educational background. (In other words, if you’ve homeschooled in order to have wild opportunities throughout the world, you might get away with a little extra in order to explain both the atypical academic part and the wild part.)
As long as you have an understandable context, don’t add extras to the application. Presenting a tight application will work to your advantage, even though it will require more work to produce. A long application with multiple essays showing different facets of your background can make it hard for ad cons to see you as a whole person. Instead, try to pull all your interesting parts together into a cohesive whole, showing how the parts add up.