Honest to goodness, if he had any type of build or definition it wouldn't be nearly as bad. People bought into Austin Aries at one point and he's 5'5" legit...but he actually looked like an athlete. Most of these wrestlers are smaller than you'd expect so size isn't necessarily the issue here, but you have to have some kind of look I can believe in. Cole looks like...a guy. That doesn't even work out. Orange Cassidy looks like more of an athlete than Cole and he's a genuine string bean.
Now he's got something, no doubt about it (certainly not my kind of wrestler, though), but when I see pictures of him and see that his arms are literally half the size of mine (and I'm not that big, trust me), it kills my suspension of disbelief. Combine that with how grating and offputting he can be sometimes AND
the fact that he isn't really that good of a wrestler, and....yeah. It can definitely be hard to take him totally seriously.
I will say that I didn't have a problem with a prospective Hangman/Cole title match at Revolution until Britt Baker joined the Elite this week, which has less to do with Cole than with how AEW has totally ruined her character for me). That's not nothing.