In your example, switching from jQuery was just a matter of personal preference. There's nothing wrong with that.

My original comment left out some context: on HN, a lot of the hostility to jQuery is either cultural or gatekeeping oriented. Cultural opposition is of the 'not invented here' variety, e.g. 'Why use Dropbox when you could do this w/ rsync? Gatekeeping-related opposition is where it's implied that you shouldn't call yourself a dev if you use jQuery and not vanilla JS.

That is the kind of discussion that happens nearly every time a link to YMNNJQ is dropped.