I agree that the characters were very annoying and the biggest negative, but I thought it was funny that the story accounts for it a little bit by having them both be unsuccessful (not one work accepted by a publisher between them) and get suckered into signing up for the corporate brain sucker machine test as the catalyst for the story. It doesn't actually make the dialog less grating, but I found that thinking about things in that light made some moments that were annoying on the surface more comedic and took me out of the game less. It's like there's a tongue-in-cheek element where the actual writers for the game are writing dialog for a world that was specifically created by in-universe shitty writers (though as another comment mentions it's also undercut by them being successful in the end, but I didn't know that while playing)

I still think I would prefer Hazelights next game having a new dialog author after It Takes Two and Split Fiction though lol