You can still get that kind of furniture if you want it. It just costs a couple of orders of magnitude more than even "expensive" Ikea furniture.

It seems very plausible to me that there was plenty of crappy (probably homemade) furniture that wasn't any better than Ikea historically. Heirloom quality furniture takes real skill, time and materials to make. I can't imagine that the average pre-Ikea family would have been able to afford for all of their furniture to be of that quality. Not being any kind of historian, I have no idea how they filled that gap.

It doesn't cost a lot, in fact you can often get it for free. This EconTalk episode is a good reference: https://www.econtalk.org/adam-minter-on-secondhand/

The problem is that people by and large don't want solid and reliable. They want a wardrobe with a full-size mirror and soft close drawers, not grandma's hand-me-down mahogany wardrobe that's built like a brick shihouse.

This thread is also full of people complaining about IKEA products not holding up to moves, but I bet most of them would change their tune if they had to move a house full of solid wood furniture.

That stuff is heavy. You can buy an old wardrobe that will barely dent when hit with a sledgehammer, but the labor cost of moving it is so high that it can be cheaper nowadays to scrap it and buy a new one from IKEA.

Sure, you can always find deals in the second hand market, but someone has to buy it new.

I've been making a lot of our own furniture over the past decade. Getting better at it. ;-)