When I want to know the time and date that something was Created or Modified I require a bit of standardized precision.
e.g. [5/31/2017 7:33 PM] (actually, I'd prefer the ISO standard of [2017-05-31 19:33] but that's another discussion).
Instead, the "Friendly" format gives you useless approximations like "a few minutes ago", or "29 minutes ago", or "May 5".
This is what people are used to and what I suspect is the majority use case.
Why would we want to impose a non-standard format, "Friendly" or otherwise. The "Friendly" format is the unusual non-standard format and as such deserves to be the optional format.