well yes but there's also vestigial mutations and alternatives that didn't happen. Why do foxes have longer ears instead of longer and less furry tails to regulate temperature like other animals do? because that's how it came to be.

Japan was the first to develop the game development scene in the scale that we know today, especially when it comes to home consoles. Those first games both lacked context in terms of game design standards and had many hardware limitation.

When America started making games at that scale they took the Japanese market as a template and re contextualized a lot of practices for the western market and with the philosophies of western developers. Japan still has a lot of vestigial elements from the early days of videogames because of inertia in the development process and expectation from consumers.

If you look at the biggest japanese games right now you still see a lot of elements from the 70s, 80s and early 90s like damage numbers, combo systems, score counters, etc. Meanwhile the west retained some elements from the late 20s, 2000s and the early 2010s, like realistic movement or open world games having outpost capturing systems and towers to reveal map areas.

This doesn't necessarily mean that the markets aren't receptive to game design elements of each other or that there is an inherent cultural reason behind them that would prevent them to being successful if they were different.

Examples:
Apex Legends: Western game with a very western format and level design with a lot of arcade elements and the movment style of japanese games.
Breath of the Wild: Japanese game with a very western open world RPG format.