There's nothing pedantic about it. The pedantic ones are some wrestling fans like you who're addicted hanger-ons from days gone by.....people who can't let go and insist on watching a show out of spite and acting like they always know better than the people in charge. People who think they have a right to tell the owner/creator how he should brand his own frickin' company.
Vince McMahon has always been embarrassed to run a wrasslin' company
Wrong. This is the bullshit narrative that purist smarks spin because again, it all comes back to that sense of self-assured superiority. He's not embarrassed at all. He's proud of what his dad did but admits that wrestling WAS what his dad did. His vision of the genre has been drastically different from day one despite surface similarities and a couple of basic elements. It's highly effective branding that's worked quite well for decades now, whether smarks like it or not. Regardless he's always agreed to disagree about this, with old-school employees for example. These same people have admitted that when it comes to wrestling in WWE, the least important thing is the wrestling itself. Wrestling isn't wrestling. The funny thing is that casuals understand it better than hardcore fans at this point, even after the EVP of the company spelled it out for said hardcore fans....along with why superstars and divas hold a significant meaning and that guy is highly old-school. It's also something multiple former SUPERSTARS and DIVAS have expressed repeatedly too, even people who formerly identified as being "anti-diva" or were "hurr durr I'm a wrassler" types before they joined WWE and understood the reasoning behind all the branding.
Vince McMahon isn't even half as anal about all these terms as the wannabe experts make him out to be after they stuffed their fat faces with turdsheets out of Meltzer's asshole, washed it down with convenient interpretations from shoot interviews and thought they were in the know.
WWE goes out of their way to not even say "wrestling/wrestlers.
Wrong. A lot of people have been saying those terms on the air for ages now.
The company is just The WWE now, not World Wrestling Entertainment
Wrong again. WWE's just an abbreviation that's easier to say every time instead of saying the full thing. The company's still officially World Wrestling Entertainment Inc.
They don't even call their fans "fans" anymore, they're "The WWE Universe."
Fans and WWE Universe have been used synonymously since that WWE universe term was coined. It had nothing to do with distancing themselves from wrestling either and is no different from any of the other billion fandom communities that identify themselves/get identified by the creators with a unique term instead of "<insert thing> fans".
A lot of wrestling fans roll their eyes when WWE does this, and some - like this mod - go so far as to say WWE isn't "real" pro wrestling as a result.
It doesn't matter whether they like it or not, the harsh reality is that WWE isn't pro wrestling. The mod was right. But he should have used a different word than "real" to get the point across better, assuming he wasn't just another other jaded anti-WWE elitist.