I think the answer is “It depends.”
Depending on which of the colleges my son chose, he could have started in either DiffEq or Calc 1. I think at CMU SCS, he would have been essentially done with the math requirements. (Elsewhere he was a physics major.)
He’s attending Caltech, which doesn’t give any AP or college course credit, and he likes it. He doesn’t feel like all the AP courses and college courses he took in HS were a waste, because he learned things and is now learning lots more. But, I suppose from the outside, it looks like he is “repeating” Calc1+2, Linear Alg, and Multivariable.
A math or physics major who hadn’t taken some multivariable calc in HS would be at a disadvantage at Caltech. This is because MVC math is covered spring of frosh year, while it is used in winter of frosh year in the physics “analytic” track. But there is a bootcamp course in winter that teaches the basics of MVC for those students. And, about 1/2 the students take the “practical” physics track, which covers the MVC part of E&M during spring.
He did push to take Calc BC in 10th. It wasn’t a race to get to higher math, just him trying to be in a class that fit him. I put barriers in the way for him to skip Precalc (AoPS Precalc course and Math 2 subject test), but he did those. (We are not Asian, if that matters to anyone.)
I agree that for many non-STEM HS students, statistics is a much more valuable course than calculus or even precalculus.