The aversion comes from high school English, where getting students to avoid passive voice results in a quick, cheap improvement for nearly 100% of them. Since most people never get much better at writing than they are in high school, this is a net-good.
The bigger lesson, which students who keep working at writing learn, is to be aware that active and passive exist and that it's worth keeping an eye out for sentences that read better with one or the other.
But, for whatever reason, high school students use way the fuck too much passive voice, and they use it inappropriately. If the only rule you can get them to internalize is "stop using passive voice", that helps a ton. It stops being a "rule" if you know what you're doing, but they don't.
Source: I'm close with a few English teachers, and with some authors.
The bigger lesson, which students who keep working at writing learn, is to be aware that active and passive exist and that it's worth keeping an eye out for sentences that read better with one or the other.
But, for whatever reason, high school students use way the fuck too much passive voice, and they use it inappropriately. If the only rule you can get them to internalize is "stop using passive voice", that helps a ton. It stops being a "rule" if you know what you're doing, but they don't.
Source: I'm close with a few English teachers, and with some authors.