And all that just to give people illusion that they got in through special merit, not just baseline merit + some luck.

It would be much cheaper and much better for both students and universities if applications were handled by a random number generator. That is, from the pool of students that applied to a given facility and crossed some per-faculty grade threshold, just bin then together and pick at random, until all places are filled.

(If you're worried about grade inflation, introduce university-provided exams instead. And/or design the first year to aggressively weed out anyone who can't pull their weight.)

But alas, there are lots of people making lots of money from handling admissions and providing extracurriculars, I'm pretty sure they'd object :).