My kid faced more or less the same exact choice as a 12th grader (5 on Calc BC as an 11th grader) and wound up taking the AP Stats route along with most of his friends. He didn’t do MVC at his CC though, because of a conflict in time schedule teaching a class, plus he was already taking a couple of classes at CC and taking 6 APs. In retrospect he probably should have taken the MVC class at CC in the spring, but he didn’t either. He got into his #1 school UC-Berkeley as a Comp Sci-intent major and is taking the very difficult Linear Algebra equivalent class this first semester as a freshman, so I don’t think the OP’s kid will miss out on much if he doesn’t take MVC and/or Linear Algebra in 12th. Taking a good Python or C++ class instead is probably more useful.
Oh, and Berkeley gives you null unassigned credits for the AP Stats with a 3+ so it doesn’t help you with much but at least you get credits. My kid’s roommate is an EECS guy and he didn’t take MVC either in HS, taking it now.