>>12077822People thought he was good on the stick because in the WWE his thing was breaking kayfabe and shooting shit on the corporate hand-picked superstars. He was the first of the post-WCW indy guys pushes hard and had the air of being different and a rebel and he used that to his advantage to promote the idea that he was anti-establishment and anti-corporate, and this worked best when the WWE was at its most sanitised during the early 2010s.
Him being able to use real-life shit, like Hardy's drug problems, in his promos also allowed him to add heat to programs.
The problem when he came to AEW was that he could no longer cultivate the character of being the indy guy, the rebel, the anti-establishment guy, because many of the guys he was feuding with had been indy guys and AEW itself was positioned as the rebel fed. Instead, he was the guy coming from a nearly decade-long run in WWE and then a big contract with the UFC. He didn't join the company at the ground floor like Jericho. He waited to make sure it wasn't a bust; he waited for COVID to dissipate. He waited for Khan to give him millions and guarantee the world to him. And this meant that now he was everything he had gotten over sparring with in WWE; he was the John Cena.
Meanwhile, the privilege to break kayfabe and use real-world shit to inflame feuds was no longer granted just to him and no longer was he a golden child with while everyone else had problems to expose. Now he had real chinks in the armour to be exposed and they hurt a lot more, so when he tried to trade barbs with guys like MJF, Kingston and even Hangman, he came out looking weaker than them, because rather than doing character work he continued to tread the path of the shoot promo, but his opponents had better ammo than he did. He had been exposed as a fraud on the UFC stage, he was a known mercenary, he had come out with cringe shit like the FOX show, he treated his best friend like an asshole.
