Those stats are about the GPA and ACT scores of ADMITTED students only, which doesn’t tell us anything about students who were denied admission. For all we know, tons of students who were denied admission had similar GPAs and ACT scores.

We can argue whether these students had bad essays or other factors working against them. Maybe that’s true. But there’s nothing in those stats you mentioned in the OP that make that true.

So it's clearly not the norm that a student with a 3.5 GPA gets in while a 4.0 does not.

Again, we would also need to see stats about the students denied admission in order to draw that conclusion.