IOW, he'd be Necro Butcher.
There's perhaps some validity to that, but Foley also did more than simply garbage wrestling (he was no mat technician, mind) to get over. He's a very charming and warm person when given the opportunity. I think that's in part why people liked him.
But even Butcher rationalizes his lot in life. A video I watched months ago featured him talking about all the hell he puts his body through, and he sums it up by saying (paraphrasing) that he grew up a poor, dumb West Virginia hillbilly. His only lot in life was to work at the sawmill and beat up his body for next to no money (if you've ever been in a sawmill you know how highly dangerous they are); so getting cut up while making more money and traveling the world is, to him, a better lifestyle choice.
I'm glad to see less and less of that style of wrestling, to be honest - and while PWTorch wants to get on its pretentious, know-nothing high horse about chair shots to the head, Steen/Corino was a great match in part due to its brutality, but the relative lack of brutality we've seen all across wrestling in recent years. It made that match stand out - you got the feeling that there was *truly* something on the line in that match.
I don't think we have a choice between "vanilla" and "bleeding all over creation" wrestling. The biggest problem is that WWE and TNA matches mean nothing at all week to week, and there's nothing to get invested in week to week. The six-man main event of Raw last week? A vehicle for a storyline between Kane and Cena, the wrestling itself is irrelevant. The main event 3 weeks ago when I went? Another six-man match that was just feel-good wrestling, nothing on the line, nothing of urgence, no real result to derive. Compare that with Cena/Punk from MITB, which was not vanilla wrestling and certainly wasn't garbage wrestling. WWE and TNA's greatest problem is the need to keep matches short to accommodate TV time (or, from another perspective, their insistence that big, long, rock n' roll entrances and 15 minute talking segments are better ratings-wise), so the matches suffer from a viewer inability to see the match develop, progress, ebb and flow, and deliver an important finish.