>>12242087There's a lot of things going on, and furniture is a great example of societal changes.
There is also significant meme value. Go into any modern home and they will have at least one room with a couch or two facing a TV. Obviously these things are necessary, but almost everyone has them - even people who spend very little time sitting down watching TV. Houses are literally designed to be filled with furniture in specific ways which subtly encourages people to buy furniture to match, whether they really need it or not.
There is a proliferation of cheaply built "disposable furniture." This is in significant demand because it makes furniture affordable for lower incomes, but it is also desirable for the modern world where people often move every 5 years to a new region for school, employment, or other reasons. Rather than buying expensive well-crafted furniture and ship it all over the place, cheap furniture can simply be thrown out or given away.
The cheaply built furniture also disguises the loss in purchasing power that has happened over the years due to inflation, much like shrinking the size of a bottled drink rather than increasing the price. You can still buy a finely crafted solid wood table, it will just cost 5x more than you expect it to. The more corners they can cut the easier it is to keep the "price" stable for a given product. This is also one of the reasons that real inflation is much higher than "official" inflation.
