I used to have the same attitude toward teasing and joking that you do. I still do, actually, in many situations, but I’ve loosened up about it a bit since I realized that some significant subset of it is a form of countersignaling. That doesn’t mean it’s always benign, even when it’s meant that way—one obvious failure mode that I run into is when a particular one of my acquaintances uses it to signal that they think I should trust them, when they have not actually earned my trust, and winds up causing me to trust them less—but some of it is, and having a framework to think about whether it’s benign or not seems to make it less frustrating overall.
I used to have the same attitude toward teasing and joking that you do. I still do, actually, in many situations, but I’ve loosened up about it a bit since I realized that some significant subset of it is a form of countersignaling. That doesn’t mean it’s always benign, even when it’s meant that way—one obvious failure mode that I run into is when a particular one of my acquaintances uses it to signal that they think I should trust them, when they have not actually earned my trust, and winds up causing me to trust them less—but some of it is, and having a framework to think about whether it’s benign or not seems to make it less frustrating overall.