I don't know how long it's been, but when I was born, Korean traditional restaurants already provided a few free side dishes with the purchase of a main dish.
They even placed water purifiers at each restaurant and provided unlimited free refills of bottled water, but it was already adolescence when I found out that this is rare even in East Asian countries.
Now, even the most shabby restaurant in Korea will not have customers unless they provide two or more free side dishes, and even McDonald's even offers free refills of ketchup.
However, tourists who visited Korea seem to be quite burdened by this. When I go to a Korean restaurant, I only order the main dish, but I keep coming across a situation where several side dishes are served. No one even told me that all of these side dishes were free, so I didn't even touch them, but only later found out that they were free.
The free side dish competition among Korean restaurants is the biggest attraction of Korea to Europeans living in Korea, and this topic is often mentioned on TV. The tourists who do are surprisingly Chinese...
