No, but perhaps labor drops tenfold with switching from proper wood to glue mixed with toilet paper. You throw sheets of that pulp on a machine that laminates them, then throw that on a CNC cutter, add a bag with some screws and glue, a sheet with instructions, and ship the complete flat-pack piece of furniture to customer. Not much human labor involved, and it scales well.
Yeah, but you can do exactly that with proper wood too. As far as I understand, there's no reasonably priced option like this in US. Feels like this either-or extremity is a learned coping strategy for something going wrong with wood at US end. And with matresses, and table tops. That something's going wrong at the other ends is well-known, but it doesn't have to correlate 100% with the problem.
