>>18171202Basically every decade in the 20th century saw kayfabe decline. Late 90's and early 2000's are when it mega-died and it was explicitly known by everyone what wrestling was and that it was fake. There was a bit of a resurgence in the 2000's because of the shift to being a kid's show, but this ended up killing kayfabe even further because kids realized it was fake and started telling each other it was fake. Adults also had to constantly tell everyone that wrestling is fake because the only people who believed it were kids, and they didn't want to look slow.
Smark culture exploding in the early to mid 2010's killed kayfabe so much that most wrestlers didn't even bother with gimmicks. The closest to kayfabe we have now is meta stories and promos that blur the line between real beefs and wrestling. I think the latter is why Punk remains so strong no matter what he does. He has a lot of shoot beefs and he's god-tier at worked shoots.
