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It's important for the holistic evaluation part but I don't think it stands out as much as people say it does. But if you have anything unique, definitely centre your story/essay around it.
Short answer: Stats weigh a lot compared to ECs or even work experience, but it depends on your “profile type”
However it is very nuanced and the best picture you can get is only from mba students who can reverse engineer the process after spending a year or two with their classmates (so you are right to ask here) and ex-adcoms who can speak honestly about the process.
When adcoms say that the process is holistic what they actually mean is that it is selectively holistic. The first question you should ask is into which “pile” will my application go? And it is not as simple as “veterans” or “Indians”. Depending on the adcoms approach and the size and diversity of a given school’s applicant base you can land in the pile of “non-diversity sponsored consultants” or “sponsored consultant from the west coast with interest to get into tech IB”
From here, the truth is that if the pile your application lands is large enough, you might get screened out even with median to good stats for that school. Your ECs or essays might not impact anything at all, if the people going through the pile have to check hundreds of profiles. (Even though at least two of them will take a look).
So if you are an over-represented type the initial screening will likely be done by cutting people from the top based on stats. Adcom members will not say that they don’t read your essays, but the ones I talked to confirm that “read to admit is still there but it is harder to digest and pay attention when it comes to “large piles”
So the questions are:
How large is the pool that your ethnic and or geographic background places you into?
Current industry?
Target industry?
Job title?
Maybe you got an employer that will ring a bell and spark interest but not overly represented? (e.g., OpenAI vs Google)
From there you can think this way:
1) large pool: you are selected based on stats and the rest of your application might move a needle in your favor but having boring application is totally fine
2) small pool: more holistic review, here having great stats helps, but there is much higher risk that someone with a better combination of the ECs, recs, and essays will be selected instead.
Last point: this is all pre-interview. Interviews screen out people based on other factors.
Hope this helps
Source: T15 business school, friends from T15/M7, two former adcoms who were honest for once
I think it depends on your overall profile. About a third of my application was about playing on a travel kickball team, and my intent was to be a personality/fit admit. I don’t think my stats were that great but I was successful in the process anyway.