My younger son’s APUSH teacher had a pretty good system to keep things under control. He had a long list of things for the students to fill out before he’d write a letter. I don’t remember all of it, but one was to give him a copy of one of the papers you wrote, another was to write a short essay about which text you’d liked the most and why, and another was about what you were thinking about majoring in and why. I’m guessing by the time you’d given him all that info, the recommendations were not boilerplate, and you had to be willing to go to the trouble to be thoughtful in your responses.