I'm with you. This feels a lot like when people grumble about some big company changing their logo. Mostly inconsequential but a vocal minority takes to the blogosphere to complain and it all dies down after a few months.
People rarely even use the like button, let alone the dislike. I'd wager the majority of casual users don't even know anything has changed.
Not sure what your definition of "rarely" is. Normal well-liked videos have a 10 views to 1 like ratio; that does not fit my definition of rarely.
When the dislike count was available, videos in the same category I mentioned above would get 100 likes to 1 dislike, perhaps that I'd call somewhat rare.
But either way, I also don't care about the removal of the dislike count at all, one can still access the ratio via views to like count.
It does sound actually crazy that people are up in arms about this.
People rarely even use the like button, let alone the dislike. I'd wager the majority of casual users don't even know anything has changed.