We're talking about the masses. Non-cookiecutter stuff costs more. Not everyone can afford to pay 5x or 10x what an IKEA product would cost.

Shelf life? I have items from Ikea that I have had for over 40 years, like Ivar shelving and Poang chairs. And they'll be handed down to my kids....

Define “good”.

I couldn’t justify the cost of the furniture I really want. So off to IKEA I go!

And if you have a bit of skill at choosing and assembling IKEA furniture, then you can customise things on the cheap so at least it can look the way you want.

While helping friends move, as one does, I often challenge them to disassemble and reassemble their IKEA gear and still have it tight on the other side, so to speak, of the particle board ..

Some do it with grace, some of us with a bit of duct tape. Others, not at all.

I've had a lot of my Ikea furniture for over a decade. That includes a dining room table, several bookshelves, office table with glass top, coffee table, and several other things I've forgotten about, and we have some dressers that are years old as well. And several of these pieces have been involved in a move or two.

Applying care and some wood glue during construction will yield a very solid product for years to come. And you have to have a little bit of taste and discretion when buying, as Ikea indeed has a wide range of quality among their items. Any item that has real wood will definitely last.

Some of it is very good, although you have to dig to find it. They use real wood in many pieces; it's not all disposable.

I don't think that the good stuff is popular, though, and it certainly isn't highlighted. When a durable (often secretly classic) design slips in, it doesn't last more than a few years. The price is usually too high and it's usually too heavy (for their audience, not for me.)

I've still got some really elementally designed and sturdy mounted shelves from them that I've carried from place to place, and installed and removed many times, for the past 30 years. They were probably discontinued 28 years ago; I couldn't find them in back catalogs and AI couldn't even help. I would have started to doubt that I got them from IKEA except that I have one set of components that is still in the packaging. It's simple steel and simple wood, and the wood (IKEA pretending like a plain flat wooden board is a product) is easily replaceable.

I have to be honest, I don't really value furniture that is heavy for the sake of it. I like hippy-futons, simple wooden tables with drawers and removable legs, transformer chairs*, etc. Being able to be disassembled and easily moved or stored is something I value, and being able to be flattened against a wall so the room can be temporarily reconfigured (a requirement for colonial US furniture) is ideal (double drop-leaf tables are wonderful.) Wood and steel are durable, and simple designs with standard hardware are easily reparable.

[*] https://www.core77.com/posts/58815/Different-Design-Approach...

I've got a bunch of BILLY bookcases that have survived several moves and are conveniently easy to mod with basic power tools.

Sadly, I don't know if it's worth trying to keep them at this point, because they replaced the previously decently durable wood veneer surfaces with glued on wood-pattern paper wraps (https://www.wsj.com/business/retail/ikea-furniture-inflation...). It's lead to me having a mix of old ones that still look like the day I put them together and new ones where all the corners are already visibly raveling from the wear of a single move.