First of all, I'm not an interviewer, so take my opinion with a grain of salt.
I don't think people get into Auck Med school purely because they did heaps of extracurricular activities. However, I think the motivations behind doing all those activities may be important. E.g. it is more important to want to work with people/ have leadership skills than volunteering at a rest home even if you have no desire to work with people.
It can be hard, without extensive psychological analysis, to decipher if a person does have qualities such as leadership, desire to work with people etc. As a consequence, perhaps the interviewers are not looking directly at your list of extra-curricular activities, but really using this list to assess the probability that you have the "ideal" characteristics. This is based on the assumption that candidates who enjoy challenges/ being a leader/ working with people are more likely to engage themselves extra-curricular activities.
My reasoning above is based on the fact that interviewers tend not to care how many EC activities you do, but will pick 1 or 2 and ask you extensively about them. If you aren't a passionate "people-person", then the chances of you engaging deeply in an EC is smaller. Consequently, you will be less able to talk about your EC in any depth.
I would think that deeply engaging yourself in just a few EC activities (ones which you are really passionate about) is much more appealing, from the interviewers' perspectives, than taking a little dump on every EC under the sun.
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