You said it yourself.. before smartphones.
You gotta know your audience, old school dudes was doing shyt like that on little house shows to put in a performance for the thousand or so people in crowd, now that you got smartphones everywhere you can't go pulling that same shyt, especially so blatantly as Owens did, then run on Twitter after to make a big joke about it.
shyt is grade A cornball smark shyt that dudes on Reddit circle jerk all over, but it really exposes the shyt out of the business even worse than it already is at this point
Exposing the business is a dumbass 1970's Jim Cornette bs term.
There's nothing left to expose, but what it does do is ruin the moment of the match. That chinlock shyt is boring as is, then you got Owens talking to an audience member and Reigns not trying to fire up or use that distraction or anything.
It just takes away from the presentation