The only reason cultural considerations are being examined is in an attempt to find some context, some manner of thinking, that could make the behaviors witnessed make sense.
To claim that it's somehow racist, or that it's attempting to say "all Koreans behave this way," is silly, and actively detrimental to any genuine attempt to understand other cultures. In finding something in underlying cultural assumptions that gives explanation for their behavior, it is not saying that Koreans are all robots who make stupid decisions. It is saying that we now have some additional context to understand that these decisions were not made by some sort of bad idea generator with no context.
It is an effort to find context.
If you were to say that somebody standing up to his boss and telling him off is rude and destructive to his own career, and wonder what could possibly lead a man to behave so insanely, and then you learned that Americans value straight-forwardness and consider business superiors not to be inherently social superiors, you are not painting all Americans as idiots who will insult "their betters" for no reason other than to be insulting. You are, instead, attempting to find how, to the man who behaved in that strange fashion, his behavior seemed reasonable.
It's not racist to say "Oh, Americans have these values baked into their culture. And that makes his behavior make at least a little more sense."