I suspect that sometimes you had people objecting to something else that bothered them about your writing, and sometimes it was a programmed-in twitch, like people objecting to split infinitives even though they can't find any rewrite that is neither genuinely awkward nor confusing.
One useful thing I did some years ago was to read a nineteenth-century style/usage guide, which was written in the same sort of way as Fowler's Modern English Usage. That set of stuff that he was sure good writer would want to use, which had been considered unexceptional before I was born—things like "fix" to mean "repair" rather than "attach"—was a useful reminder that language changes and that even a good written style guide is going to be out of date on some things by the time I read it.
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timeasmymeasure
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One useful thing I did some years ago was to read a nineteenth-century style/usage guide, which was written in the same sort of way as Fowler's Modern English Usage. That set of stuff that he was sure good writer would want to use, which had been considered unexceptional before I was born—things like "fix" to mean "repair" rather than "attach"—was a useful reminder that language changes and that even a good written style guide is going to be out of date on some things by the time I read it.