there are a LOT of varieties of tomatoes and each community has different tastes and expectations (as a rough generalization, Koreans turn to cherry tomatoes as the go-to snack when dieting the same way Americans turn to iceberg lettuce or celery)

but to expand on @poVoq’s point – I see the main emphasis on transport show up when a community switches from market shopping to supermarket shopping – when the emphasis switches from seeing what came in that morning versus stocking up for the week ahead, your emphasis on produce switches from cooking the ingredient that night to needing it to survive stuffed into a plastic bag in the back of the fridge for a week …

on the “when life gives you lemons” side of things – should be able to find plenty of recipes for fried green tomatoes and green tomato pickles (both out of Southern US)

I think this is mainly an issue of the tomato variety that is bred to withstand transport abuse and still look nice in the supermarket. If you wait for them to become soft, you are basically waiting for them to be half rotten.

Where I am in southern Australia the tomatoes are ripe so that you've got to eat them within a week of buying. You can usually buy some ready to eat right now, or some that are a couple of days away from ripening, even though it's not really the season for them here at the moment.

Where I am in Australia they are a weird pink colour and are flavourless, also $10 per kg so I havent had tomato for about a month. I miss a good tomato 🍅

Not sure what things are like in Korea but here in California you can only get good ripe tomatoes at local farmers markets. And even then it’s only some producers. Good, ripe tomatoes are perishable and difficult to transport so the supermarket model can’t supply them.

So try buying direct from farmers. Or grow your own if you can find some space!