Would you say the same about Independent University of Moscow or about or the ETH? At least IUM is obviously better than Harvard. I don't have specifics about Harvard people, but I know that the Chalmers people I know have a higher average level than the Ivy League (none from Harvard) people I know. I have no comparison of the KTH people and the Chalmers people, but in theory the KTH people should be better, because I've never been in a workplace with both the KTH people and the ivy league people, so I can't compare them.
The core thing though, is that people in the US who want to get into these schools have to do hoop jumping. For these Swedish schools hoop jumping makes no sense, because you'll get in if you're academically sound enough, so you can actually focus on academic soundness, so you do.
Furthermore in the current political environment, such analysis-free rants aren't just chum that makes like-minded rambling uncles need more blood pressure meds, but rather can end up being fuel for someone-must-do-something-type destructionist rallying cries that only serve to facilitate more grift by the performative strongman administration - compounding the very problem!
Constructively, the difficulty is that reforming institutions and restoring societal trust is very hard. Here we've got at least four things that need to be done simultaneously -
1. restoring belief that the system will significantly punish you if you lie/exaggerate about having a disability
2. restoring trust in the system such that people, both internal and external to the institution, aren't inclined to panic over "xx% of students claiming disability"
3. reforming the general system for people without disabilities, eg testing methodologies and cramped housing accommodations
4. generally reforming what counts as a disability that makes sense to even try and mitigate
Fail at doing any one of these and we've still got similar pressure to cheat, so the problem will only ever retreat a bit rather than having formed self-reinforcing cultural values.
(I'm addressing the problem referenced by the article, not the adjacent problem you've described)
I think the right solution is strict test-based admissions, like in Sweden, and forbidding schools from admitting other than on test results. In addition to that, making things like getting top government jobs also test based. In Sweden we do this for diplomats. You have to get a university degree, but whether you get in doesn't depend primarily on prestige or interviews, it depends on whether you pass a somewhat difficult test.
In this way you ensure that what university you went to doesn't really matter, and over time what I imagine is a more distributed university system where co-operation with institutions and someone's particular ideas matters more than what institutions he's associated with, and where the extreme prestige of particular schools disappears.
I think it's especially important to eliminate the hoop jumping, so that people can know that, as long as the extreme prestige universities exist, they can get into them if they perform well enough on exams, with nothing being able to interfere with that-- no individual judgement, no subjectivity, no hoop you haven't jumped. Just pure merit, like the Swedish or French system.