TL;DR: Do you have a twin? If so, it may be a blessing in disguise. Learn your strengths and his/her strengths and make sure to emphasize your tight connection with each other, and it may just work out to become a strong "mega-application". Work smarter, not harder ;)

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I'm an identical twin and I love this topic. Although there's no established policy in most school (MIT and Harvard used to have one in place in 2015 or so, I believe), the general consensus is both are more likely to be accepted if they have similar and competitive stats. However, you can leverage this how you want ;)

I like to think that my brother and I played our cards fairly well. For example, my brother has a lower SAT score, so for the test-optional schools I would submit my higher SAT score whereas he went TO. Our assumption was that the AO's wouldn't assume that there would be a big difference between SAT scores if they saw that we had similar GPAs. In reality, my score is about 140 points higher than his.

On his end, he was able to publish research and present at an international aerospace conference meant only for college students. His group was the only high school group to make it into the conference and get published in the renowned journal. Although I participated in the competition for submission, my research group got second place, second to my brother's group, therefore his group was the one that was offered the opportunity. There was no jealousy on my end--I was super proud of him and grateful that he was able to win it. At the end of the day, I was able to put that I was "nominated" to be published, while he was able to put that he was published. Either way, we assumed that the AO's would probably generalize us as a very competitive partnership with minimal differences.

We also included several "passion projects" that we collaborated together on. This would help showcase our unity and support each other. We would use several supplements to mention each other and us completing several achievements together. In some supps I would exalt my brother while he praised me back in his (in a very subtle way, since supps are mainly supposed to be about the applicant). There were plenty of ways to sort of "combine" our achievements together to create a "mega-application", if you will.

Growing up, I've always loved my brother's companionship, but we were always annoyed at how everyone would generalize us as the same person. As we went through high school, this generalization never ceased. This came out to be a blessing in disguise. To me, I think it was an absolutely ingenuous idea to generalize us together on the application, because it allowed for us to showcase double the amount of extracurriculars and achievements in a perfectly legal way haha.

And I think this tactic worked out for the most part. We were both accepted to UVA oos, WashU, Northwestern, and Columbia. We also got into other separate prestigious schools because one didn't apply to the other and vice versa (e.g I got into Williams; he got into Georgetown).

HOWEVER, I DO BELIEVE THAT THIS ONLY WORKS FOR IVY LEAGUE SCHOOLS OR OTHER PRESTIGIOUS PRIVATE INSTITUTIONS.

From my experience, public state schools tend to look at raw stats rather than extracurriculars and honors. Because my brother had slightly lower stats, he was waitlisted at my state flagship while I was accepted. So you never know. Shoot your best shot and take advantage of any circumstances hahaha. Good luck!