The confirmation is in [1]: many journalists and writers don't even know how to define the passive. It is a sad thing to watch.
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.
In non-fiction (especially journalism) it's frustrating when it's used to hide who did the action.
..or..
In non-fiction (especially journalism) it's frustrating when the writer uses it to hide who did the action.
To get this clarity with active voice we need to replace "the writer" with a pronoun, like "someone" or "anyone", but it is just ugly.
So to my mind there is no silver bullet, no simple ways to do it right in all cases. It depends.
I write in English about German bureaucracy for non-native speakers from all over the world. Using active voice in the second person makes instructions far clearer if you have a tenuous grasp of the language. You know exactly who does what.
I also find active sentences easier to parse in languages I'm not fluent in.