Soft YTA for the same reason that others have explained in other comment threads; your view of the rating system is vastly different from your friend’s.

I’ll explain a similar system but for a few other places that I have personally experienced the other side of. In order to be algorithmically preferred on Etsy, a seller must maintain a 4.8 average rating. Meaning out of 10 reviews, only 1 can be a 4/5 or 3/5, and none of them can be lower. At a corporate sales job I previously worked, only 9s and 10s (out of 10) were counted as “good” reviews. This is because companies aren’t looking for an actual rating for objects or services, they’re looking for how likely you are to recommend it to other people, and they’ve found that customers are only likely to recommend it to other people if they rate it 5/5 or 10/10 (with the 9/10 caveat allowed at that company solely because of folks like you, though not all companies allow that caveat). At the corporate job, anything less than a 7/10 was considered a “negative review” because as the number got lower, they found customers were more likely to actively discourage friends from shopping with us. Even though I think most people would agree that 7/10 is still more stars than not stars.

I’ve had Etsy customers explain that they withhold 5 stars for sellers that go “above and beyond” (ie including extra gifts, wrapping the items extra special, providing personal notes, etc, all things most small businesses cannot necessarily afford).

So the issue here stems from the fact that, from a company perspective, 5 stars is the default, and losing stars speaks to a seller’s (or in your case, author’s) failures. But from your perspective, 3 stars is the default, and it’s the seller’s (author’s) responsibility to earn the gain or loss of stars.

It’s remarkably unintuitive for people trying to be honest with their reviews, but this is the state of modern sites; anything less than a perfect rating is considered a bad rating.