I haven't seen and won't watch She-Hulk. I'm still trying to avoid giving money to Disney, and I'm generally done with Marvel.
That said, the show has sparked some conversation about fourth wall breaks that can be useful. Also, being a bit of a Shakespeare nut, I have some thoughts on this.
Really, the fourth wall breaks are seemingly always interpretations of soliloquies. The dictionary definition of a soliloquy is simply that a character is speaking his or her thoughts alone or regardless of any hearers. That still leaves a question of whether the character is talking to his or herself or the audience.
The two heavyweights of Shakespearean film adaptations are pretty clearly Laurence Olivier and Kenneth Branagh. Laurence Olivier did, on occasion, use fourth wall breaks -- he particularly did so in his adaptation of Richard III. Branagh hasn't used them. Yes, he broke the fourth wall as Iago in Othello; but, he didn't direct that film. Branagh's interpretation of the soliloquy was probably best shown in his performance of the act 3 scene 1 soliloquy in Hamlet, in which he literally delivered the lines to himself in a mirror.
So, I will say that, at best, fourth wall breaks have been something that I'm willing to tolerate thus far. I can't recall a moment, even from Olivier, wherein an actor looked into the lens and started talking to me and thought, "Wow, that makes this scene better."
The reality is that fourth wall breaks are different in mediums wherein the camera is the eye through which we're seeing the events unfold than theater. The willing suspension of disbelief is harder to play with in cinema and television than in live theater. When characters break the fourth wall in film and television, that's creatively playing with fire.
The fact that one of the writers of She-Hulk said that she loved fourth wall breaks so much that she wished that they could be in every scene does make me think that the writers don't understand how the medium actually works. If Laurence Olivier could barely make it work, I doubt that a bunch of clowns working for the circus that is Disney can pull it off.
