If its 1:1 then yes particle board should weight a bit more.
Make plywood with the middle being balsa, and the surface being lignum vitae.
I've only had one piece of real wood furniture that was ever close. That was made out of rock maple, which turns out to be a very accurate name.
For this particular project we were under pressure, so I picked up the wood from a big-box store a couple nights before the grand-kid started remote kindergarten. The next day took about 3 hours to cut the boards (1 hour), drill pocket holes (1 hour), and assemble the unit (1 hour) (minus drawers). Since I hadn't done drawers before, it took probably another 4 hours to bang out 3 drawers (each a different size). But that all was all "fun time", I had already put in my 8 hours of work, and doing shop work is a good distraction and this gave me a worth-while project. The wife ended up doing the stain and finishing (about an hour or so applying it, and a day or so to dry).
I ended up doing another one, where I took more time to do multiple coats of Danish oil (steel-wool treatment on the last couple coats), so I have a bit more time in that one.
If you are interested, I documented the second desk and put it up on reddit https://new.reddit.com/r/DIY/comments/iprn2n/made_a_desk_for...
This design was originally supposed to have plywood on the inside of the seating portion, so that's why the pocket holes are visible. Turned out it was strong enough without it, so if I do another one I'll add additional 1x2 boards on the inside framing in that section, and taper the legs to make it look better.
Not counting milling time, because if this wasn't my job, I wouldn't have a jointer and planer, I've put together a basic bench in an afternoon, which is fundamentally the same construction as a joined table. It would take longer for sure without a router to cut the mortises and a table saw to cut the tenons, but probably still only a day. If you put a gun to my head and made me pick only one of those, I'd keep the router.
I built a staked table for my partner entirely by hand (including milling the top) last April, and had that pretty well put together in a week. I didn't have a way to turn the tenons, so that part was a very slow and iterative process. That I did twice, because I kind of botched it the first time and had my rake and splay pretty inconsistent. Fortunately, I left the legs long.
In a past life I owned a full size metal tanker desk I bought $40, stripped down to bare metal and I loved that desk until I had to give it up when I moved countries.
People don't like buying used, but furniture doesn't wake up one morning refusing to work because a dependency is no longer available.
The irony is that a lot of people throw away good furniture made from real wood to buy IKEA particle board. As a result of which I can acquire good solid furniture from charity shops and online classifieds for close to nothing.