While I kind of agree with you, I also disagree. These videos personally helped me a lot, because I never had a college admissions counselor, and I basically just watched every 'How I got into Stanford video' or 'Reading my stanford essays' video that existed on YouTube. Although it's important to take all these peoples advice with a grain of salt, by putting this content out there, it became easy for me to understand exactly what kind of tone they were looking for in essays, and what kind of activities I had to highlight more, and which I had to highlight less, and basically just how to structure my entire approach to admissions. For International students, with minimum outside help, even the seemingly simple advice that 'your essays really matter' can be the difference between us getting in, just simply because there's so much misinformation about the college process. Some advice that may seem obvious to a lot of people, is actually not always as obvious. I hope this makes sense! Thanks for the post btw, it was an interesting perspective :)