The embarrassment is for the comparably unsophisticated tastes, and I don't share the feeling but I can understand. It's like everyone discovering that your uncle is addicted to something cheap and insubstantial that only children like, like junk food.
I'm taking your "believable American action scenes" with a big semi full of salt.
Let's have the semi jump off the end of an unfinished highway overpass and do a barrel roll. While the truck is slo-mo flying through the air we'll cut to a ground shot of a middle-aged dad about to salt some meat on the grill, but the barrel-rolling truck overhead spills just the perfect amount of salt on his burgers so he just looks up and shrugs. Finally we'll cut back to the massive explosion as the truck hits the ground.
In American films, if someone does extreme, superhuman stunts, the filmmaker typically feels pressure to explain that the character is actually superhuman in some way and not an ordinary guy with an office job. And he or she will be in peak physical shape.
In Indian film, an utterly ordinary character in "office job" physical condition will catch bullets, run faster than a full speed train, etc. No pressure to explain the seeming contradiction with ordinary reality. The film could be considered a romance, having ordinary people as protagonists, and these characters would be doing the above-mentioned stunts as part of the plot.
These aren't hard and fast rules, both sides of the divide deviate from them, but that's been my observation.
this is a feature and not a bug. The urge for excessive exposition is so tiring. Not everything needs an origins story, explanation, or a prequel. Hollywood has been leaning on that formula and you can see it in the product - the movies have become tiresome.
Nobody needs an explanation for their “powers”. Excessively qualifying a character more likely burdens then than lifts them. RRR was such a refreshing, thrilling watch parallel to Mad Max: Fury Road.
Kind of like anime...
This is precisely what Americans love about it though. Indian cinema comes from a completely different tradition than Hollywood, and it’s a breath of fresh air. Action movies should be more silly. It’s just entertainment.
A great analogy is to the Ugandan action films as well (go watch “Who Killed Captain Alex” right now if you haven’t). They are doing something completely new that breaks the Hollywood tropes. We really need more of this, because the American film industry has reached a creative dead end.
In fact, Tom Cruise actually performs most of his stunts, especially for the MI movies. It's kind of his thing; while the context of the stunt might be CGI the action itself is real.
He's worth more than a billion dollars, so he can afford to pay specialists to train him; he supposedly spent over a year learning to hold his breath for several minutes just for the water tank scene.
Action movies have always been unashamed about having an element of lowbrow populism. You can enjoy seeing bad guys get their asses kicked in The Matrix even if you've never heard of plato's cave - and there's nothing wrong with that.
That’s why I like them. So refreshing.