A lot of people who spoke out about how much they hated Jar Jar Binks were probably speaking entirely about the character as if he was a separate creature.
Simon Pegg is probably right in his comments, posted on Twitter by Now This.
Motion capture performance for CGI creatures was a brand new technology at the time and audiences simply weren’t used to thinking about the actor behind the special effects.
If anything, it’s a testament to Ahmed Best’s success in the role that people didn’t think about the person who created it and saw Jar Jar as something different, but in the end, it meant he wasn’t really considered when people became critical.