I really dislike when the performers itself treat it like a joke or don't take it seriously. We all know it's a story and not a real athletic competition, but watching all the fourth-wall breaking, winking, nudging and general silliness that goes on with a lot of indie stuff truly leaves me be-wildered. Even if the performers treat it as a joke, it's still incredibly dangerous and taxing on the body. So you have performers making no effort to suspend our disbelief while in reality they're injuring themselves just the same.
I'm generally impressed with how, if done correctly, you can maintain the emotional connection that is often referred to as "suspension of disbelief" while making the unreality explicit.
Wrestling has its own set of "in-universe" realities that we the audience are conditioned too. If they're adhered too, and everything makes sense in the logic of that framework, I find it easy to suspend disbelief... provided of course I care about the conflict.
Equivalently, it's the only form of fiction which some people think isn't "real". Try this on for size: "You know movies aren't real, right?" Can you seriously imagine anyone saying that? It would be utterly absurd. Yet in discussions of wrestling, it's par for the course.
A fun way to make sure you aren't invited back to parties is to convince those people that you genuinely believe the UFC is a work while pro-wrestling is a legitimate competition.
The adult fans might know it's fiction; children are still figuring out where that line sits.
Arguably the largest part of this illusion "kayfabe" has been dead for years and years - everyone knows wins and losses are predetermined. That doesn't stop promotions from using wrestling news and social media to blur the lines of what's real and fake when it comes to contracts, injuries, and alliances.