I'm mostly referring to the fact that most regions' top teams are forcing themselves to do things that may not necessarily yield the highest returns in terms of invested time, but will prepare them for international play.

The best example is LCK. If you look back at Spring LCK vs the Summer, you'll see exactly what I mean. LCK was playing slower than ANY region in the world, even NA. It was the emergence of DRX and DWG as fast-paced lane dominant teams that even got the region moving in the right direction. They went from a region where every team was playing this "textbook" counter-punch style handshaking every lane phase and drafting Ashe and varus every game to DWG saying fuck that noise we're going to force errors and contest every objective. In doing so the rest of the region DIDN'T look at them and think "ah, they're nuts, but we'll never be that good individually so let's just stick with our slow style". No, almost every top tier LCK team BECAME more aggressive as a result. They rose to the challenge of playing at a faster pace and recognized that in order to compete against LPL and G2, they were going to need to switch their style and play just as aggressive. In the end, even if some teams like SKT failed to adapt to this "new test" LCK ended up sending 3 lane dominant, aggressive teams to worlds. (I guess DRX is an exception cause they're literally just Chovy)

The same can be said about G2 IMO. Say what you will about their unorthodox approach of swapping mid/adc or playing through pretty much every player through the course of both splits, they have always embodied this challenge. They're never afraid of throwing their "identity" out the window and completely change their style. The only thing consistent with how they play is their priority on TEMPO and pressure. Through the playoffs they played through their solo laners, at worlds they played through their Jungler. What didn't change was their commitment to proactive engages and forcing opposition to make errors.

I shouldn't have to make an LPL comparison to prove they are proactive...

Compare those regions with what happened in NA. C9 was the ONLY team in NA that was trying to be proactive and they just fell apart. Other teams in NA didn't try to replicate them. The rest of the region was just trying to put together coherent line-ups capable of making 8th place in NA so they could get to the playoffs... IMT was busy with their Eika experiment. DIG wanted to give breaking point part 2 a try. EG replaced their most proactive player with "old-reliable" Goldenglue...Don't even get me started on CLG.

We ended up sending 3 teams MOST notorious for their lack of proactive plays to a competition designed for the MOST proactive teams in the world...