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You know the adage "villains act, heroes react" (and hence the villains are the drivers of the action and as such generally the more novel and thus interesting side?) I've usually seen that brought up as a scold against uninteresting, reactive heroes, and there can be some merit to that - but I don't think this situation exists because of a failure of our collective imagination; I think it goes down to a more fundamental level of what we think of as "good" versus "bad."
Because proactive characters ARE the ones who tend to be more interesting; they're the ones who do what they want and drive events. However, this makes them less PREDICTABLE than reactive characters, who mainly tend to follow rules - and if you know their rules, they're not going to startle you like a more willful proactive person one. But people LIKE to be 'startled' in stories, but not in real life - in real life, disturbances to your status quo are statistically likely to be for the worse. Good people follow rules, and as such are predictable, responsible, and safe.
Proactive people, on the other hand, are much more enthralling, but because they do MORE than just react and follow rules, that makes them seem more unpredictable (and/or your pick of unreliable, irresponsible, untrustworthy, dangerous, or bad.) If you want your main character to be more interesting, you're probably going to want to bump their proactivity up a bit - but not all the way, because that puts them in the realm of "seems crazy and dangerous."
Now, it IS possible to write characters who are both especially proactive and good/reliable, but it's a tricky strait to navigate; what I'm guessing it requires is giving them a lot of conscientiousness and wisdom (and writing smart/wise characters is tough!)
So if your protagonist is a Good Guy, that goodness will tend to come at the cost of proactivity, and thus they won't be as enthralling as they could be. Just the way things work - we think safety is good and also boring!
