Aside from that, in my view a world where a sofa costs less than one weeks wages is the absurd and unsustainable one. We've adopted an attitude of being incredibly entitled to cheap tat and that needs to stop.
1. fixing stuff
As long as some dude on the other side of the world is willing to make a new sofa and send it to you for cheaper than it is to fix it locally, the idea of fixing it locally will just never take off. You can ban/limit international trade, but then you're just screwing over poor people on the other end of the world for a "feel good" kind of thing
2. not making cheap crap
You can find some way to disincentivize making cheap stuff. Ban IKEA.. etc. But then you are just making life harder for the poor in your own country. That's cool you can afford a 5 figure quality sofa.. many people in the US won't be able to afford that. It just comes off as a bit heartless as well when rich programmer types deplore the quality of cheap things. There are the five figure sofas if you want. Go buy them - nobody is stopping you. You don't have to force everyone else into that price bracket though
The two things aren't disconnected. But in the end it seems like rich people want to ban cheap things, so that they can have more local repair services for their expensive stuff
Or, in short: the problem isn't that I can buy cheap crap. The problem is that I cannot buy moderately expensive good stuff - there's only cheap shit, and moderately expensive shit pretending to be good (and then the good stuff I can't possibly afford).
Currently anyone who would produce that needs to compete with IKEA, and somehow needs to convince customers that their furniture will last longer. Currently the best way to do that is hand-cut dovetails and only hardwoods. But there's quality to be had with modern solutions that are muuuch cheaper than the old methods.
To be honest, IKEA isn’t the problem here. Their stuff is above average quality / longevity until you’re at least a couple levels up in the market. The last time we were looking for furniture, it was eye-opening to see how many companies are trying to charge 2-4 times more for IKEA or lower quality furniture, where something looked nice from across the showroom but if you looked closer it was all sawdust and cheap plastic components.
3. Sustainability: Everything will have to be replaced eventually, even repairable sofas. It is important when constructing a piece of furniture (or anything else) how will the parts be recycled? We should aspire an ecosystem that goes: buy -> repair -> repair -> recycle.
As I type my keyboard is sitting on an Ikea desk. It's cheap, it's simple, it does the job and I'm happy with it.
Cheap stuff is not the problem. Crappy cheap stuff (and crappy expensive stuff!!!) is.
For example, I have two radios in my house that I don't use? Why because the crappy power leads have frayed and I can only use them with batteries.
Or again, I bought a kettle 2 years ago that stopped working after 6 months.
And it's often very hard to tell which is which in advance--and it may very well be the luck of the draw in any case.
Even an obviously cheaper Ikea dresser I have in my bedroom. Yeah, it's cheaply made and was sort of a pain to assemble. But it looks and works fine and I'm not sure I could have even gotten a hardwood dresser that cost 5x as much into the space.