You're forgetting about video games. Japan has Nintendo, Sony, and many of the biggest IPs. South Korea has PUBG and is a huge player in eSports.
Also, I dont know in which world he lives (I suppose most of his friend were Asian-Canadians) but your average westerner cannot name even 1 single cultural production of Taiwan. In the case of South Korea, most of the stuff they are known for (mainly KPop, and great movies/tv shows) has been produced in the last 20-25 years when the country reached an economic level and show business know-how that allowed them to flourish. China is not there yet.
China produces lots of good stuff, that for many reasons (distribution, advertisement, political hostility) are not known in the west.
Just one example, this is a fantastic TV show. I even say it is the best show I've watched in 2021, and you can watch it, legally and for free:
https://www.iq.com/album/the-bad-kids-2020-19rrhl1l3l?lang=e...
The quality is there, it needs to be more wisely advertised. Lots of mediocre productions too of course, but that is just Sturgeon's law in action.
The other spice of life and drama formulas seem incredibly derivative. Japan does those better to my tastes when I’m going over the in flight media options on a long trans pacific flight.
china seems better at historical/costume dramas (wuxia/xianxia being my current streaming obsession), especially for the costuming (obviously), sets, landscapes, and cultural history. they're not great for plot (holes out the wazoo), editing (quantity over quality), or writing/dialogue (uneven at best). they all lean much too heavily on tired tropes, like love triangles and (weirdly) amnesia, but are still really entertaining on balance.
i've been on the look-out to see when wuxia/xianxia really crosses over in popularity with american/english-speaking audiences, given that it's basically the chinese version of the cowboy western, simple morality tales set in (seemingly) simple times. star wars, a westernized takeoff of xianxia (but in space) seemed like a logical stepping stone, and crouching tiger, hidden dragon (one of my all-time faves) even made the leap, but didn't establish a wider popularity for the genre. shang chi, marvel's recent and modernized foray, doesn't seem to have made much of a splash either.
Japan of course has many name brand consumer and engineering product companies.
Taiwan has TSMC and Foxconn which while two of the most important companies in the world aren't well known outside of tech because they dont sell directly and don't do branding (like Intel for example).
Nobody was claiming that these places had no export economy.