As an aside, if you ever buy the same piece of Ikea furniture a few years later it's interesting to see what has been changed.
As a bit of a hobbyist wood worker, Ikea furniture is slightly soul destroying. It's often more expensive to buy the wood stock materials than it is to buy the finished Ikea piece.
Well, yes, we're back to supply chains here; just as on digikey you might find that the unit price for 1x an item is twice the unit price for 100x or even 10x, the supply chain to bring you a tiny quantity of wood to enjoy the premium experience of being a craftsman is quite expensive compared to anything mass-produced. You are paying for the experience of making it yourself.
(And this is before we get into relative wood pricing between countries; it took me a long time to understand why America had all those wood-framed and paneled houses while they're virtually absent in the UK, and of course it's because the local old forests were depleted in previous centuries. To the point where there was a whole pre-20th century peasant architecture of stone houses with only a single piece of serious lumber in: the roof beam.)
You may well be right about the reason traditional British houses are made of stone and brick. However, if you watch a new build house going up you may well be surprised to see that the structure of the house is entirely wood framed (often mostly off site). The floors and the roof are all held up by the wood framework. A brick facade is then installed and tied into the wood framework.
A big reason most of our (non custom made) furniture is IKEA is because it strikes a pretty ideal balance between price and quality and allows you to "get to town" with changes. Most other "crap furniture" does not at all support such modifications to it. For starters because some of the things we bought even though they said solid wood on the label did not actually fully consist of solid wood and were useless after cutting off a piece.
We have the 'same' dresser bought three times in three different years. The first one is pretty solid wood, the second one is more particle board, but still decent, the newest one is much flimsier and much more lightweight particle board and is actually falling apart while the two older ones are still going strong.
Don’t tell me about it. I built an Enzo Mari bookshelf and afterwards realised I had built an IKEA Ivar but spent the double price in wood.