Used to be every piece was made by hand. That was the only way it could be done at all. It took however long it took, it cost however much it cost, and you could (slightly) tweak those knobs to control the overall quality of the finished product based on the customer's budget and tastes.
Along comes mass-produced flat-packed particle board stuff. It's cheap garbage, everybody makes it, most customers buy it, and it works "fine" but perhaps there is something more spiritual about it that we have all collectively lost.
The thing is, a small group of people still perform the old craft for a small group of customers who still want to pay for it. The market for it shrank, but it still exists. It sort of doesn't matter what happens in the flat-packed space, because handmade furniture is almost an entirely different universe from particle board.
I'm sure somebody with a better grasp of macroeconomics could mop the floor with me, but that's my intuition about it.