I would put it like this: The West has "chaos in its heart" as the Nietzsche quote goes, and revels at least in the constructive version of disruption. That's not "exceptionalism," because it ultimately boils down to geography (I'll get to that).
The West romanticizes the act of discovery and novel creation, because the very geography of Europe was an engine for spinning up the hunger for the new: The Aegean was like the tidepool in which its civilization was born, full of islands to explore, and every subsequent step in the evolution of Europe and its derivative civilizations has accelerated that initial condition.
East Asia is different. China is incredibly fertile and wide. Its coast is long, but it has a low ratio of islands to mainland shore, so its history had more in common with ancient Egypt (i.e., the Nile) than with Europe's accelerating "chainsaw" of peninsulas. Ancient Egypt lurched forward and achieved things that are incredible even today, then just spent the next 2,000 years gilding the lilies they'd created rather than plowing further ahead.
China is more dynamic than that. They have periods of advance, followed by periods of slow stability, and that's characteristic of East Asia in general because their geography didn't allow anything else. It was a crowded place from ancient times, so cultures are highly attuned to stability just by harsh natural selection. Innovations that served stability were prized, others were either ignored or suppressed as dangerous.
The West is not homogeneous in this, but some aspects of it want to be supernovas - to burn bright and fast, and stab into the future with reckless abandon. Societies like China and Japan wish to advance holistically, as an entire society, so it happens in more considered, momentous, inertial terms - slow, then accelerating, then cruising, then slowing down again. Individualism is more staccato, if that makes any sense.
East Asia is content to observe our madness and pick and choose what aspects make sense for them to develop further, and they do discover things independently - though as stated, most of the time they don't see them as useful to pursue because the idea might be disruptive.