Also since preamps in powered speakers are generally fixed 100%, they pick up noise very easily whether its voltage ripples or ground loop noise. Whereas with passive speakers + a receiver that electrical noise tends to be masked significantly. This leads to orders of magnitudes difference difference in sound floors. Even $10,000/pair powered speakers will have a orders of magnitude higher passive noise floor then some cheap $200 passive speakers and a $100 entry level receiver.
If you don't like dealing with high noise floors like hissing tweeters for instance, passive speakers are often the only choice. Especially in the nearfield, if you don't always have content playing. Unless you like reaching around and turning the speakers on/off every time you decide to use it. Otherwise, hissing, amplifier buzzing, electrical voltage swings causing buzzing from the drivers, or ground loops, that kind of stuff is amplified like crazy in near-field powered speakers with built-in amps.
I agree with this for the most part, especially for budget active speakers, where the parts budget is so constrained that noise is inevitable regardless of the quality of engineering.
However when you get into pricier active speakers made by companies with a solid engineering pedigree (e.g. Genelec, Neumann) it's not much of an issue anymore.
For instance, the KH120's self-noise is rated at 20 dB(A) at 10cm—using the inverse distance law, this translates to 0 dB(A) at 1.0m. In other words, the hiss is for basically all intents and purposes inaudible to a human, even in a dead silent anechoic chamber, at a normal nearfield listening distance. Personally, I can't hear any hiss from my KH120s until I get close enough that one of my ears is literally about to touch the tweeter grille.
I guess the point I'm trying to make here is that although yes, active designs are more likely to suffer from audible noise issues (and I've certainly experienced my fair share of these in the past), being active does not preclude the possibility of being noise-free, and any competent non-budget active speaker should be as such.