I love the idea and wish more elite (top-tier, Ivies, etc) schools in the US had a similar approach. Those ECs really didn’t help my kids too much in their journey through application purgatory. They were good students (one had a 2230 and the other a 2340 on the SAT), and had many interests, but were just well-rounded kids, not special enough to stand out to Brown or Stanford.
The drawback I see is that UK and European universities require applicants to know what they want to study because they are applying for specific fields of study within the university. For this reason, neither of my kids applied to any UK schools, although my daughter says now that if she’d known she was going to major in medieval studies, she would definitely have applied to Oxford or Leeds.