Can someone tell me about the benefits of adding a jQuery plugin?

Question

What are the benefits? This seems like a tricky way to do things, so why not just take a simple approach to creating such a plugin as described in jQuery Plugins :

Please see here: http://jsfiddle.net/e2aYH/11/

Compared with..

jQuery.fn.placeKitten = function( options ) { // default settings: var defaults = { ... }; var settings = $.extend( {}, defaults, options ); return this.each(function() { // Plugin code to produce kitten image would go here... }); }; 

The author of this work also continued to argue that in any case, he would not have bothered with the jQuery plugin, and they should never be used, but instead make your code “modular”. What would it mean if not through the jQuery plugin? and if it means not using jQuery at all, I see a lot of advantages and effectiveness when using jQuery, so I also don’t understand this point.