Why was my edit to expand on an answer rejected? [closed]

Question

See this suggested edit: https://stackoverflow.com/review/suggested-edits/2430230

This was rejected on two counts of "This edit is incorrect or an attempt to reply to or comment on the existing post" and one count of "This edit changes too much in the original post; the original meaning or intent of the post would be lost."

The answer claims one approach is faster and links to a couple of jQuery selector performance documents, but it's not immediately clear which part of those documents apply. Since the answer itself provides zero explanation on the issue it brings up itself, I consider just linking to documentation with no further guidance to be about as bad as a link-only answer. I couldn't even locate anything discussing this issue in the first link provided!

My edit quoted the relevant part of the second link and provided a brief explanation as to how it applies here, mentioning nothing that is not stated truly by the documentation itself: by-class and by-ID selection is handled by the browser (from the docs on those selectors), and performing them separately is faster (from the doc the answerer linked).

Since I believe my statements were not incorrect, I was not attempting to reply to or comment on the post, and I was only adding brief explanation for something the answerer was already trying to express, why did this edit earn rejection?

Answer 1

Your edit was definitely an improvement, but the suggested edit queue is reviewed by anyone, not just people with knowledge in that area, so the guidelines are to reject an edit that is too substantial.

Once you have higher rep (2000) you can edit without approval.

The help pages say

Common reasons for edits include:

To fix grammar and spelling mistakes
To clarify the meaning of the post (without changing that meaning)
To include additional information only found in comments, so all of the information relevant to the post is contained in one place
To correct minor mistakes or add updates as the post ages
To add related resources or hyperlinks

But the culture of the review queue over time has grown to reject anything that takes a lot of thought, knowledge or checking to decide whether it's valid or not.

I think you could almost have posted your own answer with the information you added!

Summary

You did a good thing, but it's too much for a suggested edit.