@ucbalumnus there is (and should be) an explicit “get out of jail free card” if a student gets into a school early and isn’t offered adequate financial aid by the deadline to submit regular applications elsewhere. There also is (and should be) an exception for schools with rolling admissions - you can apply early to any number of those in addition to your binding early application. I think this is fair and preserves a lot of options for applicants.
I don’t have a lot of sympathy, though, for a student who wants to lock down a safety early and then collect acceptances from a lot of other schools. Applying early provides a clear statistical advantage - why waste that on a school you’re likely to get into anyway (particularly since you can also apply somewhere with rolling admissions that’s in your safety zone, if you really, really need to know as early as possible that, yes, you’re going to be able to go to college)?
At high schools where the policy I’ve described is in force, students generally apply early to a first-choice reach school, hope that doing so puts them over the top and, if it does, are thankful and enjoy the rest of their senior year, having concluded their application process (again, subject to financial aid being adequate). If they aren’t comfortable making a first-choice decision at the early application stage, well, they don’t apply early. If they’ve assessed their chances accurately and applied to the right mix of schools, they might collect a lot of trophies even without using that one early bullet. Most of them conclude, though, that they’re going to have to make a first-choice decision in three months anyway, so they might as well maximize their chances at one of their reach schools by applying early.