@CaucAsianDad, I think that every school situation is different, as many of the posts above show. The school GC can hopefyully speak to an applicant’s curricular rigor and how he/she has taken advantage of the courses available in that school. In your D’s case, taking AP courses to be in the “very rigorous” or preferably “most rigorous” category would make sense. I believe that @gibby’s children had something similar in a highly competitive feeder high school to the Ivy’s, and that the school itself encouraged taking a lot of AP tests. Context is important. Something that is done out of genuine love of learning is different than something done to impress or “game the system”, and presumably that will come out in recommendations and the overall tone of the application. But I think that once you get above 10-12 AP classes, applicants may want to be careful about whether they are creating the impression of obsessing about APs, rather than challenging themselves for the sake of it.
When I was a student I took plenty of AP courses - enough to accumulate a year’s worth of credit at Stanford, which helped allow me to do a double major and get a coterminal master’s degree in 4 years - but I never did it in order to do so, only because I enjoyed the challenge; and I took plenty of non-AP courses that were just as challenging as the AP options, despite the lack of formal designation. Today students seem much more conscious of weighting and the overall appearance of courses on their transcript.
I’m also certainly not suggesting that APs be eliminated in favor of DE or IB courses. Different options do indeed work better for different students.