Yeah, for my daughter, good essays (especially the college-specific one) and what we suspect was a brilliant teacher rec probably tipped the balance, as well as a factor that was not technically a hook but made her very attractive to certain colleges. She wasn’t one of these people that had tons of ECs, she just had a couple, but they showed proper commitment over 4 years and she had won awards etc in them.
Comment about GT above is interesting - one thing I hadn’t considered is that while her math and science scores were unremarkable on ACT, her ELA sectors were 34 and 36, and she is doing a writing-intensive major. So it’s possible that they also looked at the subscores.
So …bottom line is to re-state the obvious, getting in with below par stats is going to require everything else to be great, and you need to give them one or more good reasons to choose you over thousands of others.