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Notes -
I'm not qualified to comment on that, but I can think of 3 other reasons as well.
Large-scale US federal capital loans after 1953 designed specifically to allow the build-up industrial capacity, so that the country can develop and prosper through exports to the US, in exchange for surrendering its sovereignty in a practical sense. Basically the same process as in Japan and Taiwan.
by the end of the Second World War the Japanese were already running for more than half a century a centralized, authoritarian, repressive, tried and tested elaborate governing apparatus to administer the entire Korean Peninsula, most of which survived the war intact. The Americans just needed to take it over and keep it running for their own ends.
Before Japanese rule, Korea already existed as a polity governed according to its own Konfucian traditions for centuries.
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