This discussion has shifted and new questions could probably be better addressed if you started a new thread. But every school has their own way of requesting transcripts. Our school has a form and the requests are due 6 weeks before the college deadline. Our school charges for them others don’t. Our counselors all have students fill in a packet and have a meeting with their counselor before they write the rec. We had something happen at our school counseling office last year so all but one counselor was new to the school. No ones counselor really knows them but on the form they fill out for common app schools it asks how long they know the person so it’s not expected that everyone will have a counselor who knows them well or really at all.
Not a big deal. Many large schools have GC’s that do not know their students all that well. Here is what MIT says on the subject: