I wonder what someone who writes for a living thinks of it. Oh wait:
"The Hemingway app is fun to experiment with, and it’s useful in that it calls out in your writing places of friction—allowing you to decide whether they are necessary or merely sloppy. No one is above clarity. And the app, based on the experience of running examples of my own writing through it today, is, like a good editor, attuned to the places where vanity seems to be getting the better of things."
Programmers write for a living; novelists, reporters, columnists all write for a living. Reporters may be sports journalists, chief reporter and sole editor for a tiny newspaper, famous writer for the Times, or many other fields, each of which have their own standards and needs.
Having said that, computer editing will only get better, until it is used seriously by professionals.
The person who wrote the paragraph you qoute is a journalist. A lot of them are expected to write simple texts. Not all writing is supposed to have the same limits.
I noted that I thought the app's logic probably wasn't "up to scratch" as is --- I'm inclined to be a bit charitable, given the direction of the criticism the app's getting.
"The Hemingway app is fun to experiment with, and it’s useful in that it calls out in your writing places of friction—allowing you to decide whether they are necessary or merely sloppy. No one is above clarity. And the app, based on the experience of running examples of my own writing through it today, is, like a good editor, attuned to the places where vanity seems to be getting the better of things."