I would bet that if that’s so, it was a specific buggy plugin.
WordPress core officially supports Mariadb, and I would bet most WordPress developers develop on Mariadb and then test on MySQL. WordPress Compatibility – Make WordPress Hosting
There is no reason to believe WordPress performs worse with Mariadb (and some reason to believe it performs better, there have been benchmarks indicating that, though I haven’t looked at them in a years…before we switched the Virtualmin installer to default to Mariadb I spent quite a bit of time making sure there wouldn’t be any gotchas, including performance and memory as well as compatibility).