"Folks" is interesting. I don't know about the US, but in the UK I often notice that it is used to soften the appearance of assertiveness in a situation of possible conflict, or to minimise the possibility that the objective conflicts will actually be perceived.
It seems aimed at replacing perceptions of hierarchy and/or real conflict with the illusion of total peaceful communality.
Ironically, my absolute go-to example of this sort of usage is that habit that MNHQ spokespeople used to have a decade or so ago when they posted on MN about forum policy, etc.
In those days, there was a very active attempt to position MN as a campaigning community (which was just incidentally an advertising industry entity), rather than as a business first and foremost. So any MNHQ pronouncement had to be made in communitarian terms. The more actual conflict there was on a given issue, and the more that HQ was (quite properly, of course) making its own top-down decisions about how to run the forum, the more instances there were of "folks" peppering their posts. It was quite entertaining.