This kinda sums Bret up for me as well. Really good at what he did especially given the position he was in. But for a top 10 or even top 20 candidate, I feel you should have a huge laundry list of great matches and I don't think Bret quite has that. And while his peaks are high, I feel there are others who have even higher ones.
In some form it will be:
Kenta Kobashi
Mitsuharu Misawa
Toshiaki Kawda
Stan Hansen
Bryan Danielson
Genichiro Tenyru
Akira Taue
Jun Akiyama
Jushin Liger
Terry Funk
Curious what other WWE matches folks might recommend apart from Zayn and this recent A.J. match. I'm largely of the belief that his WWE run really hurts his case even if he did have a solid argument for best in the world during the first half of the 2010's. Feels more like a top 150-200 candidate to me.
So not only are EVIL, Finlay, Maloney, Conners, and Kidd likely on their way out, supposedly Hiromu is as well. Supposedly NJPW wanted him to move to heavyweight but he declined, which seems odd.
He's top 15 for me. One of the most consistent big match workers of the 21st century. All-timer babyface and a sneaky good heel when the time called for it. The last 2-3 years were definitely rough, but there's still at the very least a phenomenal 14-15 year run.
I don't think he was necessarily in the shape to wrestle every night, but at the very least they could've done way more dates with him strictly doing promos.
Perhaps neither here nor there, but I've always found both guys' drawing power pretty comparable, relative to their respective promotions of course. Both guys stopped the bleeding, but you could probably point to other folks who really turned things around (Okada for NJPW, Cody for WWE).