TSM's problems--and really, most of NA's problems--are so largely focused around the coaching staff tho
the players have shown a lot of times over the years that NA is capable of breeding talent capable of standing on the world stage(look at how many compliments world class top laners give dyrus, madlife has praised doublelift on multiple occasions, etc.) but our coaches and support staff frankly suck.
in regards to TSM, any novice analyst could have seen the problems they would have at MSI. a lot of the coming teams had carry style top laners, and it's been a well known problem for Literally Years that TSM tends to fold if you camp dyrus hard enough. and yet, with all this time they had to fix that issue, and with all the knowledge of the super strong top laners coming into the tournament, they had literally no top lane centric strats prepared.
this just really screams coaching and staff issues over player issues. people can shittalk the players all they want, but the fact remains that the lack of preparation and lack of confidence playing towards top from tsm means that there was an error in coaching and not enough time was dedicated to countering the one style that has been known to beat tsm for Literal Years.
part of this issue, tho, is that NA just doesn't have a good esports infrastructure yet. imo it's not that korea is just popping out babies inherently better at video games than NA so much as that they're a decade ahead of us in developing esports infrastructure. they have very experienced coaches and analysts for esports specifically, esports is an acceptable career there so their solo queue and 5s ladders are much, much more competitive than NA or EU. so of course other regions are going to import korean players at the moment, since just the environment there breeds talent so to speak, but as long as league and esports doesn't fall off in the next couple of years, NA and EU will catch up. you can literally see the skill disparity getting smaller and smaller every year, too. when we have esports infrastructure as good as korea, you'll start seeing more and more korean-tier players coming natively from NA and EU
Also why on earth did TSM pick Bard.
it was pretty much a "fuck it, hail mary" pick