I get it. Really. It took me three application cycles to get accepted (my last cycle I had already decided and I was actively pursuing a back up career), and my in-state gave me 0 love.
Likewise, I truly want to relay that the schools do not take this lightly and they 100% understand that this is a make-it-or-break-it circumstance for applicants. For one, most of the admission committee members were in the same circumstances at one point. I can promise you after working with the admissions department of my school while a student, this process is extremely important to them. They consider us potential future colleagues and the future of the profession. If they didn't care, they simply wouldn't do it. It's a cheap, thankless job that most actually volunteer for and aren't paid to be a part of.
Likewise, these admissions committees are tiny. We're talking no more than 2-3 dozen people handling 5,000+ applications to get through from Sept through the early fall to get interviews and decisions out in a timely manner. And now that the cycle starts in January (used to be May when I was applying), the cycle is even more extended on them, so they are handling two cycles at once for about the quarter of the year.
Yes, you're getting emails late at night. That is an individual who is in the admissions office emailing you at 10/11pm or even midnight; this individual's life is revolving around your (group your) application and they are working 12-16 hours a day to get through all these applications.
Schools who post memes, gifs, etc. (assuming you're calling out NC State?) do so potentially to take the edge off and it doesn't land with you, or they legitimately have a student who is paid 7-10/hr to manage social media for the school.
Again, now that we have thousands of applicants beyond even 5 or 6 years ago, file reviews are simply a non-starter. There are not enough humans in the admissions committees to be able to offer them to everyone. And that's the problem; if they offer a file review to one, they have to offer to all. And even if only 1000 people ask, that's 1000 hours, which would be 3 applicants per day over the course of the year. But they can't offer reviews 365 days per year because of holidays and weekends, and a file review on January 10 doesn't really do a whole hell of a lot of good. Just doing reviews from April 15 (signing day) to Sept 15 (closing) would be 56 days (Mon-Fri) that schools could offer reviews. That's now 18 reviews a day for 1000 applicants. That would literally be a single person doing 1 hour long reviews 18 hours a day for 5 months straight. And that's without any preparation prior to these reviews.
There are simply not enough resources any more. Vet school is finally as competitive as human medical school (used to be an urban myth until around 2020). And because of that, schools have their resources stretched thin and they are doing the best they can with what they are given by the bureaucracy that is higher education.
This isn't a message to tell you to stop ranting and suck it up. This process sucks. Been there, done that, and didn't get the t-shirt twice. I had 14 rejections over 3 cycles. Please let your frustrations out because it sucks.
This message is simply to put into perspective that the people who are determining your vet school life are doing what they can with what they are given. They have very limited control, even the deans of student life/admissions/academics. There is no malice, there is no disinterest. They care deeply about this process and take it extremely seriously.