I don’t know that “friendlier” is a good metric. AI slop is very friendly but off-putting. I’d rather hear someone’s real voice in their writing

I'm not sure what the right word is. At least according to the tool's output, it's about taking the writing down to a lower grade level.

I agree about the authentic voice. At one point, I got pretty unhappy with a fairly junior editor's changes to something I wrote. I was just going to let it go but my manager took it up with the editor's manager in the vein of "this isn't acceptable."