Yes, there is often an incredible amount of gerrymandering (greeninohio,mathmom), or favoritism (the GFC, Fallgrl)
and whatever else that is non objective in these things. At least if they tell you in advance of whether the student got an award, you can skip if you desire. I agree that in my experience many of the awards are of the “I just love this student” type. I prefer things that are clear cut (but not gerrymandered), eg. award for GPA above so and so for honors or high honors. Although when people are very short timers at a school and they do qualify to be val or sal, the others who have been there the whole time and missed by a fraction of a point take the opposite criticism. This goes with weighting of grades as well. In my own HS they did no weighting for AP etc. and the sal was not in any of those classes. For years it bothered me that I came third behind her. Eventually I realized that #4 and perhaps below that took more APs than I did and since it was calculated to the third decimal, would have likely beat me out if weighted. One of my own favorite pet peeves is schools that say they don’t rank (at least for college admissions), but do come up with a val for the graduation (based on grades). We could go on. I think the no awards starts to sound good.