I'd like to say with ZETA's recent advancements we can try to move away from using regions' pasts, whether it be in other shooters or esports as a whole, as some sort of immutable anchor on their potential and ability.
The earliest form of this was the quickly dispelled notion of "asian players can't aim" -- spread by people who think CS is the only fps that exists -- but beyond that tons of people naturally took the idea that teams like ZETA would just fundamentally be inferior players solely because they're japanese, and well "japan sucks at fps"
If you watched the game today I think anyone would agree that ZD not only kept up with but exceeded G2 on an individual level. Obviously their tactics, midround calling, and coordination was worse but nobody can say that they were the worse players mechanically.
I'm hyperfocusing on zeta here but only because they're a great example of what i'm talking about. This game isn't CS:GO, it isn't Overwatch, etc. Stop imposing your biases or whatever you think of regions because of unrelated shit or trends from other esports, that was that and this is this.
no tldr too lazy to summarize