First: spending high school hacking is not mutually exclusive with taking AP classes and getting good grades. Second: a lot of top colleges would actually be impressed with someone who had the initiative to pursue their own projects and have something unique to talk about in the application. So I don't think you need to worry too much about those kids.

I started college when I was 20, having spent an extra year in high school (startup high school, they didn't have a graduating class the year I was supposed to graduate) and then worked at a dot-com run exclusively by teenagers for a year. Or actually, I worked at a dot-com run exclusively by teenagers for 3 months, then our funding got pulled and I worked as a software engineer for the parent company for 3 months, then the parent company realized their was no money in its primary line of business and pivoted to a completely different idea, then I continued working for them for another 6 months.

Had I not done that, I probably would've stayed a physics major in college, done well, gone to physics grad school, and then realized I hated it when I was around 26 and suddenly ended up with no experience doing anything else and no clue what I wanted to do, a far worse outcome.

I think that there is, in general, far too much fear in contemporary American culture. Fear that if you don't do everything perfectly and don't follow the sequence laid out as a "safe" career track, you will end up screwed for life. Yes, if you end up following your own path, you will get burnt by bad decisions at time, and you'll have to scramble to fix them, and some opportunities will close themselves off to you because you didn't pursue them. But you will also gain practice & confidence in dealing with those bad decisions, and learn how to fix them and that there will be other opportunities that open themselves up to you because you screwed up with what you thought you wanted.

I think you're kind of implicitly arguing as if there's some sort of guaranteed path available to somebody against which they can compare their lives. There isn't, and there never was. We hear more kvetching about it today because it can punch a much larger hole in your net worth via loans, but dropping out of two years of college with nothing in your hands is not a new phenomenon. You have to put your chips down somewhere, and it is irreducibly a gamble. Presumably these people putting off college for a year or two are going to go do something; should they manage to completely fritter that year or two away with absolutely nothing to show for it, it's probably not fair to blame that on "not going to college".