Yes, the term “holistic” is de rigueur in admissions at all highly-selective universities (not just at LACs). But that doesn’t preclude that unqualified applicants are filtered out using some academic metric. It just doesn’t make sense to apply the labor-intensive holistic process to thousands of applicants who have zero chance of being admitted.
For instance, at MIT, there is a first pass and “If you don’t have sufficiently high SAT scores, you’re out.” http://■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■.com/qa-former-mit-admissions-officer/