The author wrote it in the active but Alan the editor had a strange sense of humor and turned it into passive voice. So even with the luxury of working for the NYT and having access to an editor you'd be better off to edit your own writing;-)

The latter. There is nothing inherently bad about the passive voice. What is bad is hiding agency so that actions that are taken for the benefit of some (usually rich or powerful) party are made to appear as the inevitable result of some external force. This tends to be easier in the passive voice, but grammatical structure is just a proxy here. Both “many workers were made redundant by the crisis” (passive) and “the crisis forced many workers out of employment” (active) hide the same information that “the rich cut their losses in the crisis by firing many workers” doesn’t.