Regarding professional wrestling, when it's done correctly, it's very entertaining and invokes a lot of emotion. It's much like going to see a movie or loving a television show like Breaking Bad or Game of Thrones. WWE in particular does not do it very
well for a variety of reasons, but most of their money is made on merchandising now. This is why they are so focused on PG storylines and content because that's where the money is with merchandising.
To give an example: When you go to see a movie, you
don't sit and think something like, "That car exploding was so fake and
set up to be a stunt," if you want to enjoy it. It's just a show like anything else, and it has its
own rules and guidelines like any other fantasy universe.
If you look at the
history of professional wrestling in Europe and North America, you had carnies go around and have
open challenges to anyone in the crowd of these towns they would go to. This is basically where
catch wrestling came from (consider Josh Barnett, Gene LeBell, others). These men had to be
able to dispatch
random "tough guys" quickly because they were putting their lives on the
line to make a living. They eventually figured out that fixing fights and running it like a scam artist type of situation manipulating the crowd allowed them to make a lot more money from bets on the fights while simultaneously keeping their chances of being seriously injured minimal. This is a part of why it was so important to "protect the business" by having good guys and bad guys not seen together in public, etc., for such a long time. That situation slowly evolved into the caricature of professional wrestling that exists today in the form of the WWE over decades.
One more thing I want to point out is that the WWE style of professional wrestling is much different than just about anywhere else in the world. It's much more PG, the storylines and plots are much more shallow (and often make no sense), and the in-ring
action is designed primarily to keep the performers as healthy as possible for as long as possible (less
action with worse workers a lot of the time). The emotional element just isn't there because of this and the fact that until the past year or two, they haven't really brought in much new talent for the better part of a decade, and people get tired of seeing the same old people over and over. This is why John Cena gets booed incredibly heavily even though he's the company's
top good guy.