Agree that predicted scores are meaningless in the US - hell my daughters Bio HL teacher had been on the job 15 minutes, can’t begin to guess what they would have predicted.
At our school it’s incredibly common to take the AP test - mostly because the flagship university is much more generous with AP credit and most students do great with even an SL class. My daughter had 5s on both econ APs with a SL econ class - which pretty much no universities give credit for.
My son missed a bunch of AP tests as they conflicted with the state swim meet - maybe it’s different with non-covid years, but they didn’t offer a reasonable alternative date so missed pretty much all the AP exams his senior year.