Shift supervisor at a pizza store, helping your local food pantry computerize their ad hoc donation system, teaching residents of a nursing home how to Zoom with their grandchildren– these are all valuable ways of showing initiative, leadership, etc.
Summer research is great- and so are all the other ways a kid can spend the summer. If your kid wants to do it- fantastic. It won’t move the needle necessarily for admissions, but it will be a good learning experience (or not- my neighbor’s kid who worked in a prestigious summer research lab wrote an essay on “why you don’t wear Birkenstocks in the lab” which he claimed was the only thing he learned all summer).