I think that OP is talking about experience poster’s on CC discouraging students from trying to transfer to higher ranked universities primarily because they are higher ranked. I have seen this, and I am pretty sure that I have done this.
There are a few issues here.
One is that a lot of people associated with highly ranked universities, including alumni, understand that these universities can do, but more importantly understand what these universities cannot do. Those of us who graduated from highly ranked universities have at least some vague sense regarding what we got out of it, what we didn’t get out of it. Admissions wants students who want to go there for the right reason.
Some of us have a good sense of just what “prestige” feels like after you have been slogging through piles of homework and hard exams for four years. One thing that I still remember well is students who thought that they were better than me because they attended a famous university, even though I attended the same university and lived in the same dorm (weren’t there supposed to be smart people here?).
There are a lot of opportunities at universities that you might not think of as “prestigious”. There is cancer research, environmental research, students learning skills that will help get them into medical school or veterinary school, and a huge range of other important work being done at several hundred universities and colleges in North America. Most students at a “top 200” university would be better off looking for the opportunities that are all around them.
Some of us old folks have had the opportunity to work with some people who have made great accomplishments. We see that they come from a very wide range of universities, especially undergraduate universities. We also see what they did that allowed them to accomplish great things. At some point they saw what they wanted to accomplish and figured out how to get there, or perhaps they just went down a path that seemed like the right thing to do at the time and it turned out that they were right.